Whose Faulty Vision

Coney Island in January

I went down to Coney Island yesterday to take some pictures. I figured that Coney Island on a grey day in late January would be pretty much deserted, so I should be able to get some nice “desolate beach” shots.

Turned out, not so much. There were a lot of people on the boardwalk and the beach–not as many as in July, of course, but a lot more than I had expected. I still got some interesting shots (they’ll be popping up over on my photoblog), but not the desolate landscape I was hoping for.

Oh, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Nathan’s was open (and had a line, yet), so I got a hot dog before I headed back.

New Photoblog

Okay, the colors still aren’t 100% on Windows, but they’re close enough, so I’m officially launching the new photoblog. I’m hoping to update it a few times a week, so keep an eye on it or throw it in your RSS reader.

Christmas Calendars

Oh, and speaking of Christmas presents, I decided this year to use iPhoto’s calendar-making feature and make calendars from my best photos as gifts for my family. I picked out some of the best pictures I took in 2006, laid them out, and had Apple print them–it was all incredibly easy, and they came out looking very nice. Everyone seemed to appreciate them.

One nice feature of iPhoto is that, while you have the option (which I chose) to print calendars and other photo products using Apple’s service, you don’t have to–you can lay them out in iPhoto, save them as a PDF, and print them anywhere you like. I made a PDF of the 2007 calendar, and I’m considering posting it here or on the photoblog–would my devoted readers be interested in having their own Whose Faulty Vision calendars?

Windows Color Issues Solved

Finally, with the help of some folks on two different online boards, I solved the color issues with my photos in Windows. Turned out, as I suspected, it was a color profile issue–the images had embedded color profiles, and Windows browsers don’t recognized them. They just assume everything’s in “sRGB”. So I just have to convert all of my photos to sRGB, and the problem is solved.

So I’ll have to pull down all of my old posts in the new photoblog (since they all look crappy in Windows) and start over, but at least they’ll look good this time. I expect to officially launch the new photoblog just after the holidays.

Color Issues in Windows

So I’m working on starting up a photoblog, to replace my old photos website with something that’s easier to update and maintain. I noticed, checking the first few posts, that the colors on my photos seemed noticeably duller in Windows than on the Mac. I wrote it off at first, because I know that Windows machines aren’t supposed to be as good at color management as Macs, but since I follow other photo blogs that show beautiful colors on Windows machines, I decided to take a look.

And as I’ve been looking into the problem, it’s gotten weirder. When I view a photo from my blog on a Windows Web browser (either IE or Firefox), the colors look dull and flat. If I open the same exact image file in “Windows Photo Viewer”, the colors look bright, the way I intended it. This difference is preserved even if I take a screenshot, so it’s clearly a difference in how the programs are rendering the file:

This baffles me–it’s the same image file, on the same computer, so I wouldn’t expect a difference in how the images are rendered. My first thought was that there was some kind of “colors for the Web” color profile embedded in the file, but I tried a program that’s supposed to remove color profiles from JPGs, and it said there weren’t any profiles embedded in this file.

Any ideas? This is a frustrating problem, and I refuse to officially launch my photoblog until I can have the colors looking good in Windows.

Update:

Oh, I forgot to mention: if I open the photo in Windows Photo Viewer, take a screenshot, and save that screenshot as a JPG, the colors are rendered correctly in the Web browsers. So whatever’s in the file that’s telling the Web browsers to render the colors wrong, the screenshot doesn’t carry it. But I’m obviously not going to go through that process for every photo I post, especially since I’ll be posting them from a Mac, where the problem doesn’t happen. So I need a better solution.

Ugly Chicken

The ugliest chicken I’ve ever seen in my life, taken a couple of weeks ago when Christmas and I were in Connecticut:

Hershey Bar as Health Food

From the “Now I’ve seen everything” department:

An ad trying to portray a Hershey bar as health food.