This is confusing... especially for my Grandma Oregon (who lives in Oregon and her real last name is Marshman). I have both a blog and a website. The blog is what you are reading right now. The website is a simple slideshow of my favorite 20 or 30 pictures set to music. You can find the website at
www.jeffmarshman.com. I have the website because it proves that I am not just some idiot with a camera. I have the blog because it is fast and easy to put up new work. Here is the point of all of this, I recently put up 12 new pictures on the website of some of my more current work. If you haven't gone recently go check it out.
www.jeffmarshman.com
Color Space
If you already know a bunch about color space you can either stop reading so you are not bored or you can keep reading to laugh at how simple minded I am. Here we go, I take pictures on a canon camera in RAW. I import and edit in Adobe Lightroom. I edit a select few pictures in photoshop if they need something special done. I export all the edited photos to jpeg and place them in emails, on blogs, on the website, or send them to one of three print shops that I use. All of this is basically simple and I have been happy with my process. I found a small glitch about a year ago. When I print at one of my print shops the colors look really yellow. They could not explain why. I just started using them less and manually adjusting to correct for this yellow. Then I started blogging and when I would post blogs blogger would suck the color right out of my photos. So I started completely over-saturating my pictures so that they would look bright, but they still didn't. Then I noticed that the pictures looked different on my two computers and they looked different in different applications on the same computer. Finally, I have noticed that every print I make looks considerably different than my computer. I take lots of time to edit to perfection and then the print looks different. I began to loose my mind
Luckily the story does not end here. I have found two solutions. One expensive and one free.
For printing:
My best printer calibrates their printers to a printing standard and I have bought a piece of hardware that calibrates my monitor to this standard. This has made a huge difference in the prints looking right. The company is called
xrite and I bought the eye-one display LT.
For the web:
Color space is a huge deal. I was exporting everything in Adobe RGB 1998. I learned this week as I was adding blogs and changing the pictures on my website that sRGB is the color space that most websites use. Now that I export all my jpegs in sRGB for the web the colors almost match my editing. This is tremendously exciting. There is nothing worse than taking an awesome picture then editing it to perfection only to find it looking like junk on the web.
I have thought of an analogy of how color space works. It is like paint samples at Home Depot. Bear Paint has a beautiful "sky blue" color that I want. If I choose Glidden paint they do not have a "sky blue" but they have this other "aqua blue" that is sort of close (or maybe its not but it sounds like it would be). This is like color space. When you choose RGB 1998 and Blogger is set for sRGB, then every single color has to be interpreted by a wrong color space. Sometimes it chooses the right colors and sometimes it is way wrong. Blogger sucks all colors a lot in RGB 1998, except it sucks red a little (I think... or maybe it sucks red more). It doesn't really matter now because I have the key to the color space puzzle: sRGB!
