Photo Gallery Forums

Hi,

first of all I want to say that I'm really impressed by Imagevue, especially in terms of speed compared to other Flash based galleries. I haven't ordered it yet, but I very likely will do so soon.


Now on to my questions.

The first one is regarding color management, and I'm really surprised that no one has come up with that question before (at least the search didn't find anything).

I've heard that Flash 10 is supporting color management now, but that it needs to be enabled in the flash file with some ActionScript 3 code (details can be found here).
So my question is, is this color management feature enabled in Imagevue X2? I'm putting a lot of time in post-processing my photographs, so to me color management for a photo gallery is a pre-condition.


Second question:
A lot of my friends are using a photo blog where people can subscribe to the RSS feed, which is really great as people don't need to re-visit various websites and galleries all the time but will see all the latest photo additions right from within their RSS reader.
Now I'm not a huge fan of blogs in general, but I'd love to see such a RSS feature being added to Imagevue so people can subscribe to my gallery.
Do you plan to implement that, and if not, is there any chance you would consider that a useful feature?


Cheers,
Peter

That's an interesting link regarding color management. Unfortunately, it is not something we will be able to include in any immediate future releases, as it requires AS3.0 Flash player 10, which is a level above current Imagevue X2. We will certainly keep it in mind for future productions(which there will be).

RSS feeds is something that has been touched upon earlier, and we have been considering it. The only problem in regards to RSS, is that our flash gallery doesn't really have multiple 'pages' like traditional HTML galleries have. We need to provide an RSS which covers the entire gallery in a single feed. Certainly something to look into ...

Thanks!

Thanks for your quick response, Karl.

I see. I guess I'll primarily stick to the HTML gallery then and add a remark to the Flash gallery about the inaccurate color reproduction.

The RSS stuff isn't essential, but it's nice to hear that it is being considered.

Anyway, I've noticed you guys are very supportive here and actively developing and further improving Imagevue, so even without color management I'll purchase it once my job is getting a bit less stressful so I'll be able to get involved with Imagevue and all the various options it offers.

Until then, cheers,
Peter

Thanks for your feedback!

Are you saying that HTML gallery supports your color management files? Flash is "transparent", in the the sense that it does not change the colors of your image in any way ...

mjau-mjau wrote:Are you saying that HTML gallery supports your color management files? Flash is "transparent", in the the sense that it does not change the colors of your image in any way ...

That is exactly the problem, Flash doesn't understand that it's supposed to change the color to make it look right. Well, I guess with Flash player 10 they finally figured it out. HTML is not the what actually displays the color profiles, it's the browser. Given that the browser is capable of displaying color profiles, it will look right in HTML, but Flash overlays the browser engine with its own display engine which makes it look wrong.

Regarding the HTML looking right though, I ranted in this blog (http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/08/colo ... firefox-3/) about this; there is as of now only one browser that natively supports color profiles and that is Safari. While FireFox 3 technically could do it as well, it just doesn't. The feature is turned off by default and has to be turned on in the console with some custom command, hence the average user will not figure this out.

ArcaneWorlds, I guess you are using Safari to look at your images because they look right to you. Unfortunately, 90% of the web users use either Internet Explorer or FireFox both of which are not capable (or not ready) of displaying your images correctly. - So much for HTML image galleries. As already said for Flash image galleries, unless it takes advantage of the latest Flash development, it won't look right either.

I'm sorry to tell you this but if you want your images to look good on the web, you have to make them look good in any browser other than Safari. For color management on the web in general, those two articles might be of interest to you...

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302827
http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html

Good luck
Eric

sassomoso, no I'm not using Safari but Firefox with color management enabled.

The good news is that with the upcoming Firefox v3.1 color management will be enabled by default. And you're right that a lot of people are still using a browser either incapable of color management or with the CMS being disabled, but of course there will be an explanation and a little guide on my website on how to make sure to see my photos with accurate colors (or at least close to accurate colors, as most people don't have a hardware calibration tool to calibrate their monitor).

With Firefox steadily increasing its user base and with its CMS being enabled by default in v3.1 I definitely will post-process my images with color management capable browsers in mind, as that is the future and more browsers will follow (Opera for example).

ArcaneWorlds, yes that is at least some good news that FF3.1 will finally have it activated by default although it seems IE8 still doesn't know what a color profile is. As far as I know, the current IE8 beta release is feature complete, so there is no hope that color management will make it for that version.

It's sad but I guess it'll take another year until accurate color reproduction is displayed across the board; Flash, Browsers, Operating Systems (core support for color profiles throughout the whole OS has only just come to Windows in Vista. Mac OS has had this for decades).

But yes, I will have to re-process my images once IE users are not as significant anymore in my website stats and imagevue X comes out in a V3.

That's exactly the reason what makes color management so great when it's being handled by Flash, because Flash runs on many platforms and many browsers. With a Flash gallery you could make sure, that even Internet Explorer users will see your pictures with accurate colors. It can't get much easier than that.

Apart from that I honestly have to admit that I don't care about IE users. It's difficult to ignore them when you try to sell your photos through your website of course, but mine will just be a nice portfolio gallery without the aim to make money out of it. And the more people design their websites for Firefox/Safari/Opera the more likely it will be that people start to realize that Internet Explorer is a piece of software from the last decade, not caring about current standards and developments.

Color management is little bit too painful nowadays when everybody havin TN+Film cheap LCD Screens.

Even macbook pro, they just added glass screen as a countermeasure. Too bad I didnt inspect it carefully before getting one.

I've registered here just to voice my encouragement for colour management. I completely agree with Peter - colour management is a must. Imagevue's presentation & professionalism is great, but it's such a shame there is no color management support. I guess this is a non-trivial change that takes a long time. I'll have to wait until it's available.

mjau-mjau wrote:That's an interesting link regarding color management. Unfortunately, it is not something we will be able to include in any immediate future releases, as it requires AS3.0 Flash player 10, which is a level above current Imagevue X2. We will certainly keep it in mind for future productions(which there will be).

RSS feeds is something that has been touched upon earlier, and we have been considering it. The only problem in regards to RSS, is that our flash gallery doesn't really have multiple 'pages' like traditional HTML galleries have. We need to provide an RSS which covers the entire gallery in a single feed. Certainly something to look into ...

Thanks!

May I ask, what the AS3.0 issue is?

AS3 is required to enable the feature.

mskuma wrote:AS3 is required to enable the feature.

Sorry, that part I knew. Wondering if it was a prioritization issue, massive development, tool acquisition, etc.?

This is one of those things that, if on the roadmap (as I also mentioned in another thread) users and others provide better input et al and the team can will be better armed.

> Wondering if it was a prioritization issue, massive development, tool acquisition, etc.?

It's best answered by the authors, but I think the actual coding is trivial. Maybe the non-trivial part is upgrading all the pre-existing AS1 or AS2 code to AS3 to allow this code change to be done. This may also require a new Flash compiler version.

Its not a small task to redevelop imagevue into AS3.0. Other than that, there is nothing stopping us from looking into that direction.