best browser/extensions for photo related

[Davey]

I use firefox and found many addons that I find very useful. Exif viewer FxIF is the one I use mainly. I know there are ones for changing colour spaces but I tend to keep my browser in sRGB so don't use anymore since pretty much all stuff on web is sRGB and anything I upload is too. It's no good me seeing it correctly and everyone else getting an incorrect version, especially since I don't use browser for local viewing. Still might be useful to some. Also a half related thing is cooliris, it's just a fancy eye candy style viewer (for win version only I think) for arranging walls of thumbs etc. I got it a while ago but never tried but I keep meaning too as it looks interesting and nice even if functionality wise it's pointless.

Way off topic and unrelated (but might be usueful) the other addons I use (from occasional to can't live without) are no script, greasemonkey, stylish, foxlingo (very handy), firebug, fireftp, mediaplayer connectivity, adblock plus, pdf download, foxy tunes, ie tab (win only), and a few others I don't really use much now like ipa and whois tools. I end up disabling the unused stuff (resources etc) but keep in case ever need once in blue moon.

Any others photo related especially but any recommendations welcome that people use?

[iPhillip]

I've used the Exif viewer for as long as I can remember...

Ad Block plus is another handy add-on for firefox though I've been using google chrome of late.

[The Blue Boy]

I'm using firefox now and I love it! How the hell I ever did without I'll never know. I use the greasemonkey (what a name) with the icon reply script for use on flickr forums. I'm also getting a better view of photographs on the web now.

[Davey]

I must say I like firefox more than other browsers (or iceweasel as many distros brand it now due to proprietary nature of artwork and branding licence).

I've tried a lot and still the happiest with ff. If something else came along I would switch if it was better but it fares more than ell and plugin support it's got the drop on most. I am fond of epiphany though which is very good too, and for speed (in a graphical browser at least) midori is nice and light.

I've been meaning to try chrome for a while but never got round to it. Looks interesting, it's webkit engine isn't it. I got interested as know it's origins are from konqueror, originally anyway. I tend to prefer gecko engine browsers I find but I'll try anything (browser wise that is). Still for overall general browsing I find ff does it best for me for most jobs.

[crisscross]

... I know there are ones for changing colour spaces but I tend to keep my browser in sRGB so don't use anymore since pretty much all stuff on web is sRGB and anything I upload is too. It's no good me seeing it correctly and everyone else getting an incorrect version, esecially since I don't use browser for local viewing. Still might be useful to some.

Color Management 0.4 (for FF) is the most important thing there is, so you can use 'adobe RGB' for proper colour. The camera is set to it (unless you want to tie one hand behind back), editing is done in it, so why then pox it all up again, and have to keep 2 editions of images, just because the dinosaurs purveying IE can't be bothered to get into 21st century. Safari has automatic colour management, but unfortunately shares the IE bad habit of opening programmes like Reader within its own window instead of dowloading pdfs quietly where you choose to keep them then view them using your choice of software.

[Colin Southern]

"Color Management 0.4 (for FF) is the most important thing there is, so you can use 'adobe RGB' for proper colour."

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately the great concept gets cut off at the knees in practice because only $4000 (and upwards) monitors from the likes of Eizo can display the colour gamut of Adobe RGB - so the extra space in the gamut really only comes into play at print time where the gamuts of printers using CMYK inks (albeit with RGB interfaces) and sRGB have a somewhat "sloppy" overlap.

The wider the space you use, potentially the more trouble you can get yourself into, as a colour thats only represented in, say, Adove RGB - or ProPhoto or LAB still gets rendered into 'something' for the screen - but often 'something else' on the printer - and you're left wondering what the heck is going on. I had this issue with a fairly bright red boat - when I printed the image some of the red hull appeared to have a hue shift and I was left with blotches of a more orangy red alongside darker true reds. Turned out to be an out-of-gamut issue (printers struggle with really bright reds because they don't have red ink, but monitors can display it more easily because they have a true red channel), but took me ages to track down.

Keep in mind though that sRGB (or "Sad RGB as we like to call it!") is a true standard, not like RGB - so a sRGB system (as most are supposed to default to) in theory are "colour-managed" (or "colour standardised" might be a better word) - if you shoot in sRGB and then display on a sRGB complient monitor and print on an sRGB printer then in theory you should get a pretty close match (albeit one that only the "lowest common denominator" with not as many colours as you might have got with Adobe RGB). I use the word "standardised" rather than colour managed in this case because that's about as far as sRGB and non-colour managed browsers go - feed them sRGB and they're happy - feed them Adobe RGB (or proPhoto) and (gamut aside) they'll still get the brightness levels wrong. Colour managed browsers sit somewhere inbetween - they read the profile and render things as best they can - but unless you have a wide-gamut monitor then all it's really doing is raising the brightness levels and lying about some of the colours you're seeing (ie "it's converting the Adobe RGB source to an sRGB destination for display").

It'll be a great day when all monitors can display the full Adobe RGB gamut - all printers can print it - and all browsers are colour managed

Cheers,

Colin

[crisscross]

I think I will give up on this one as it always seems to generate an incredibly complicated train of logic, which however defies the simple feed-back experience of the matter which is that if I turn off Color Management, my images look washed out and 'orrible whether posted in Adobe RGB or sRGB. The same images dragged off and opened in any graphics prog on the computer immediately look decent again (as Adobe RBG does with Col Man on & set for it). On the sRGB version, the colour is distinctly cruder albeit not washed out. That's on a standard mac screen. Even on the cheapest 'grey' flat monitor I could buy for my son-in-laws cast off PC (why he cast it off, simpler to buy a new computer ) that remains true. I am sure there are plenty of worse CRTs still in use, but eyesight not worth risking for £99.99; used to refuse to work in some offices unless I could bring my own in.

Somewhere up in the tutorial section Sean has done an excercise-demo.

Exactly what you see is something else, either on screen or printed. I have 3 alternative calibrations for the screen: north-light, energy saving bulb & mostly south daylight. The grey very obviously isn't if you choose the wrong one. Spyder isn't going to get round that, but it is nice that our camera club has its stuff calibrated with one for projection in the dark. No problem with my Adobe RGB stuff there either.

For printing I use the same test question as when editing: is this a good representation of what I was looking at when I decided it was worth pressing the shutter release? You cannot realistically compare the result of backlit screen/projected with printed, which also brings in the reflectivity (etc) of the printing paper. I once bought a pack of HP Premium Photo Plus as it was all there was in a local shop when I had to, but have stuck to it ever since, (Canon Printer ) despite its price. My belief is that it has a very thick layer of transparent emulsion over a very white backing paper and thus goes some way to reproducing the effect of backlighting.

Look forward to having my intuititive ramblings shot to pieces by cold logic, but it won't stop me rambling in virtual any more than in real life, in the latter case just because its pouring with rain or something.

[Colin Southern]

"I think I will give up on this one as it always seems to generate an incredibly complicated train of logic, which however defies the simple feed-back experience of the matter which is that if I turn off Color Management, my images look washed out and 'orrible whether posted in Adobe RGB or sRGB. "

Hi Chris,

Sorry - didn't mean to complicate things. At the end of the day, if it works then that's all that matters.

I'm at a loss to explain why the sRGB images you bring up look worse for you with colour management turned off - I use the same monitor at work for both colour-managed photoshop work and non colour-managed viewing of posted images (using IE7) and haven't noticed a problem with either (sRGB only) - Adobe RGB (or ProPhoto) is another story though of course.

So long as we both end up in the same place, and both enjoy the journey, I don't think much else matters!

Cheers,

Colin - pbase.com/cjsouthern

[Davey]

Ah I notice prophoto space looks terrible in none colour managed apps. Only had the issue a few times myself so maybe someone else knows why/how etc but I open or (incorporate in some way) the image and it looks very washed out, like vibrance/sat have been halved at least. I could be wrong but it basically looked like a wide gamut space was being assigned a smaller one like sRGB as oppossed to converted to one. Whether this was indeed the case or if that relates to your finding is another matter.

I do feel a little of the why stick with a smaller space to accomodate the outdated/inferior. Same reason I feel MP3 is p**poor mp3 compared to equiv lossy formats, it's 2 channel max (although not much of my collection is quad or 5.1dts audio), bad compression artifacts, higher size than other equal formats, poor range reproduction etc etc so why shoot myself in the foot just because an archaic format is popular standard. Without pushing for change we will stick with outdated technically limited techniques when better ones are on offer (like ie has always done so well ). For that reason most modern portable players support flac and ogg vorbis because more people pushed for the change (my choice of lossless is flac btw, but I use aotuv vorbis for the less noticable and it's compression artifacts are very forgivable).

I think a lot might be to do with the fact most people wont see huge difference due to hardware like already mentioned and setup wrong due to not even knowing of increased available palette and management/interpretation of. Most wouldn't think to look at icc as source of problem but would assume was the fault of the capture device/cgi app.

[Colin Southern]

"Ah I notice prophoto space looks terrible in none colour managed apps."

It will - this is to be expected, and is quite normal.

ProPhoto is a much bigger space - but the same range of number are used to describe tone within it. Say that each of the 3 primary colours could range from 0 to 255 with 255 bing the brightest that a colour could be ...

... if you go to a medium gray in the sRGB space then the Red, Green, or Blue channels might be 128 - 128 - 128 (I've leave gamma out of this for the sake of simplicity) - but if you were to display the same medium gray in ProPhoto, the numbers assigned might only be 90 - 90 - 90 (because ProPhoto has to go waaay beyond the maximum of sRGB - so it has to be more conservative in how it uses the numbers) ...

... so ... if you feed the numbers from the ProPhoto profiled shot to a non-colour-managed application it won't know that the 90 - 90 - 90 is in a ProPhoto space - it'll ASSUME that it's the numbers for a sRGB image - thus the tone that is displayed is dull and unsaturated.

In essence, because most monitors are sRGB devices, a colour-managed application simply converts the 90 - 90 - 90 of the ProPhoto profile to the 128 - 128 - 128 that the monitor needs to display the image at the right intensity.

It's a great start, but it won't accurately display any extra colours that may be contained in the wider profile since that beyond the capabilities of the monitor, but unless you have a very well trained eye, you won't miss them. That's one of the limitations of spaces like LAB - it can produce colours that only exist in theory, but photoshop has to translate them in to "something" for us or they would just disappear. What would blue look like at 100% luminance? Can't do it - so photoshop just shows it as white, as an easy example.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,

Colin - pbase.com/cjsouthern

[Davey]

Discovered a new addon tonight (thanks to insomnia), UnMHT. It adds MHT support to firefox making saving/archiving web pages easier. As well as reading .mht saved in ie it also allows you to save to .mht including saving all open tabs to a single mht file. When you save multiple tabs/windows to one file when you open it it displays a plain hyperlinked list of the page names which open normally when clicked. Quite handy hope it's of use to others.

It supports FF3 unlike MAF (which is old and unmaintained for a long period and experimental on ff3) and due to working in microsoft file format can be shared with others easier.