I'm still here!

[kookyfox]

Waaaaaah, not been using my LJ or any other journals that much lately. >.< I fail. Hehe. But in a quicky update, life is going well! Certainly vastly improved from last year at this time with all the bleh stuff that was going on then. :( But still work is work. I've been doing some artwork lately though still don't feel like I'm advancing as much

Comments

[reptyle]

I have to say up front that I don't really understand color profiles so some of this may be incomplete, but.  Basically, color profiles can be embedded in picture files, and they tell any decoding program/device what colors should look like.  Sounds silly I know, but every monitor, printer, scanner, camera, operating system and even program may have a different idea of what colors are.  Plus they have different ranges of colors they can reproduce; your monitor, say, may have an easy time with deep blues while my laptop screen doesn't, so the picture I see doesn't look the same as the one you see.  Then I print the picture, and it turns out my printer doesn't, for example, print bright reds all that well.  Without a color profile to define what the picture should really look like, each device interprets the colors in the picture its own way.

Remember that badge you did for me, how I first said the colors were pale, then opened it in a different program on the same computer and the colors were fine?  That was a lack of color profile.

So when a color profile is associated with a picture, magic happens and colors look pretty much the same everywhere.  I highly recommend reading about them elsewhere, from someone who actually knows how they work. :)

Like I said, I was going to mention that you should use color profiles, but going back through my saved pictures I found that sometime around July yours started having them.  Digging a little deeper, it likely was when you upgraded from Photoshop 7.0 to CS3 (the files told me), and your CS3 sets the "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" profile by default.  As such, the colors you see on your computer will be nearly identical to what everyone else sees.  Mission accomplished!

On the issue of JPEG quality, as a discerning viewer I say use a 10 or 11.  As you say, hard drive space is cheap, and dial-up modems are gone and good riddance.  And for some reason compression artifacts grate on my eyes. :)  (Additionally, I hope you save the original images either at full quality or in a lossless format like .PNG, so you have a good source image to archive.)

Thank you much, and Happy Holidays to you too! *hugs*

[kookyfox]

Oh yeah I had gotten a new computer and CS3 in there I guess was around July, yeah. Hehe. But still I should look up some stuff on color profiles, I really don't know anything about them. And yeah usually I save jpg quality out at 8 though have been forcing myself to use 10 now lately. :D Thanks for the input about it all though!