LF on the WWW and the monitor

[paulr]

I used to whine about this. Then I learned how to prepare images for the screen and I think they can look great. If your work is good, it will look good at screen resolutions. This is true with only the ocasional exception.

Look at better examples of work online by Atget or Weston or Timothy O'Sulivan or Nick Nixon. How much does it really suffer? Sure, you'd rather have a print in your hands, but, you'd probably also rather be getting fed grapes and massaged by a Geisha. Just be happy you have so much access to great work!

Some work loses its soul when you lose the microscopic detail; some work has lines that are slightly off horizontal or vertical, and will give you aliasing nightmares regardless of screen resolution. So don't share these images digitally. The rest of your work can look crisp, lush, and luminous, with nothing hindering its overall form.

If all your work depends on amazing your audience with microscopic detail, then that sounds more like a problem than something to be proud of.

[Frank Petronio]

geez, such a simple question for you guys to turn it into an arguement is really funny.

World peace in our time? nah, I don't think so.

[Ed Richards]

Thanks Frank! I think they must be grumpy from the summer shooting doldrums.:-)

[Marko]

Thanks Frank! I think they must be grumpy from the summer shooting doldrums.:-)

You bet, it's over a 100 (F) here! Not easy to do anything outside, so here I am, sitting at my computer...

[Josh Z.]

Wouldn't the bigger question be color spaces and file formats? Most web-browsers unfortunately are not ICC aware, and therefore preparing the web-image in a color space such as sRGB or something similar would be the best bet.

As for resolution though, there is not much you can do about it. As a rule of thumb, use something in the area of 600xsomething or 800xsomething (with the "something" being the smaller number that maintains proportion). This is due largely to most web-users using monitors with resolutions of 640X480 (this size is rapidly becoming less common), or 800x600. In short, if your image is too large, then the general web-user will need to scroll in order to see the entire image, which is generally a bad thing. Also, if you provide a large enough image, then it's not difficult for anyone to print that out at a very respectable size and be happy with it.

As for file types, you should be aware of the differences between jpegs, gifs, tiffs, and PNG. Or in short, lossless v. non-lossless compression. For most intents though, with a jpeg no larger then 800 pixels on the longest side, and with a file size of less then 100KB, you should be fine.

This is all to say that, in the end, representing your work over the web is a very difficult thing to do with absolute control. Everyone's monitor is different, and in a different environment. While you can control the lighting in your own exhibition space (hopefully), you can't do anything of the sort over the web reliably.

...

As far as DPI and PPI go, DPI is a non-term for monitors. PPI of course represents your monitors resolution with regards to it's actual viewable area. I would only see PPI being important if you wanted to display an image on someone's monitor at exactly 4"x5", then they would need to have a specific PPI to do so. Otherwise, it's mostly worthless.

...

Hopefully this helps some. The best thing to recognize, and I can't stress this enough, is that you really have no control (or at best very little) in showing your image on someone else’s computer, over the web or otherwise.

[Steve Kefford]

....This is due largely to most web-users using monitors with resolutions of 640X480 (this size is rapidly becoming less common), or 800x600.....

Don't know where you got your figures from, but 0% of users have 640x480. 74% have 1024x768 or larger. I don't think we are really answering the question here though.

Steve

[David A. Goldfarb]

I try to make images look as good as I can, and then I have one LF demo page with some big files just to convey a sense of the detail in an 8x10" neg. Here's the front door--

http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/photo

and here's the LF demo page--

http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/photo/imviaduct.htm

[Josh Z.]

My figures, or rather advice as I stated no figures, come from experience. I'm a web-developer and I've seen plenty of bug reports from users with screens at 640x480. Granted, that particular user set is outside most development targets now-a-days, but 800x600 is often a necessity. Otherwise large segments of our user-base would be excluded.

Now, of course the user base that I develop for for my day job, is not the same as those that may visit a fine art web-site, however, it's not something that I would ignore out-right.

[Frank Petronio]

A lot of seasoned citizens still set their monitors to 640x480 so they can read the type. Of course photographers can probably safely assume that vision-impaired people are not their primary audience, but I try to keep my sites functional, if not ideal, at that resolution.

One of the advantages of building a standards-based website using accessible techniques is that the sites will generally be usable with almost anything, from a cell phone to a super-computer. These viewers will be at the fringes of your target audience but it shows that you are thinking and considerate (as well as just being a good practice and common sense). It also "future-proofs" your site so that it should work with the next few generations of technology.

[Marko]

There is a difference in your users' working resolution and their preferred browser window size. Not everybody uses their browser maximized, in fact, majority of users have several windows stacked so they can switch between applications, only one or two of those being browser windows.

Even at the browser window maximized, the maximum viewing area in a browser is smaller by the amount of "browser silver" - the toolbar, scrollbars, statusbar, etc. This also varies from browser to browser.

For these reasons, it might be prudent to design optimal display for at least one step lower than the average max. resolution. How high you can go or how low you have to stay depends on your target audience.

And yeah, Frank, having your site pop on the cell phone and be usable without wating half a day for it is quite a statement to make, and for anybody, not just designers and developers. If there ever was a good case besides speed to be made for standards-based design, that's it.

Any browser, any time, anywhere.

It says something about how serious you are, and more important, how seriously you take your clients. I've been doing just that for several years now and the expression on a client's face when you demonstrate it is still something to behold.