skibum5 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · A few good examples of why wide gamut monitors matter: | |
melcat wrote:
Thank you for posting this skibum5. I despaired that anyone else cared about this.
Yeah, me too.
Especially with the way a few guys on some other forums have been going around the last year telling everyone that wide gamut is rip-off made up by some marketers trying to get people to get stuck on the upgrade cycle while receiving LESS than nothing in return (they actually go on about how wide gamut monitors not only don't do anything useful but how they are actually the worst type to look at images!) and that you are a sucker if you fall for the trap. One even keeps insisting that 10bits are required for wide gamut too, even though that is nonsense. He says that wide gamut = AdobeRGB = 10 bits and that wide gamut can't even been seen without using an expensive pro graphics card. None of which is remotely true.
I was mostly just trying to counter such posts.
And especially with the way the owners of Smugmug and Zenfolio still insist on banning wide gamut images. I mean wow, the two sites that should be at the forefront of helping to slowly get wide gamut out there, are the most backwards, anti-progress sites in existence. Smugmug tends to be particularly obnoxious about wide gamut talk.
Approximately 2/3 of the petals on your rose (#3) is outside the gamut of my wide-gamut monitor.
Yeah the simple red rose is actually remarkably hard to see realistically other than in real life. Wide gamut monitors at least begin to get you there, but even then, a real rose is yet more darkly intense.
Do you have any links for such software? I fear my own free time is not copious enough to write it myself...
No. I have some books that discuss what you'd need to do to code such software and there are some links with some code fragements and pseudo-code but I haven't seen the actual software in full put out there. It's possible there are some links somewhere. If not, you have to code it yourself. It seems like mostly color scientists and maybe some advanced commercial labs have some stuff in house.
John Wheeler wrote:
Mostly, I try to get colors back into gamut by reducing saturation until the gamut preview shows me clipping I can live with. Frequently the colours in the resulting image are too tame to retain what was interesting about the image to start with. Aside from reducing saturation, what methods do you suggest?
Yeah mostly messing with saturation various ways, sliding tint around a bit, sometimes changing brightness a bit (sometimes the saturated colors exist in either brighter or darker tones). Sometimes it looks decent enough. Sometimes you lose a lot and it's kinda painful.
Basically I've largely stopped bothering at this point. I'm so behind on my photos as it is, spending all that time trying to fit things into sRGB is just too much added time, so if someone has wide gamut and they see the full image in it's best light great, if not and maybe I could have tweaked it a little better, well what can I say, it's a shame, but I'm no longer going to spend what would add up to hours and hours of time over many photos making sure that lowest denominator sees the images a touch better, maybe just here and there where a careful retuning seems to be particularly necessary and it's a really important image.
Although I have though about trying to write a gamut mapper that uses some of the fancy algorithms in the various books and papers. Then I could just fire images through that and try a few different methods really quickly. although even with that it's starting to become tedious to uploaded two different versions of everything, again I'm almost hopelessly far behind getting things online as it is. But it might even be useful for wde gamut monitors too, as you note even the rose still doesn't really fit on most wide gamut montiors, so a little advanced automatic mapping might help even for this stuff.
On Zenfolio I've been uploaded all prophotorgb and letting it convert them to sRGB (granted it would be better to convert them before they got turned into 8bits) so that is not really ideal. But I don't want the mess and time of uploaded two different sets of everything. I hope one day they allow the original wide gamut to be seen if the viewer selects that options. It's more than time they got around to not forcing all images to be seen as sRGB.
For now I'm stuck using Flickr to host my images as wide gamut viewable. Which is a bit ironic if anything, since Flickr is the photo site that probably has more beginners (although with even IE remapping all images to sRGB and the other big three properly handling all gamut types it's not a likely worry now; if someone is still using IE8 on XP, well oh well, that isn;t even a safe or smart thing to do virus and attack-wise at this point anyway either), less wide gamut monitors used to view the site and the most tablet viewer (this is the one place where wide gamut images go to pieces) usage.
|