Test my new page please

[Ed Richards]

Hi,

I am working on generating WWW pages from Lightroom. While Lightroom is not very good for processing LF images, it is very good for managing a large number of images and making them into WWW galleries. I have built a page using Lightroom and the Turning Gate template system, and I want to make sure it works on other people's computers and is not too slow:

http://www.epr-art.com/TTG/index.html

You can comment here, or email me.

[Marko]

Hi Ed,

It works OK on a Safari (Mac), but your top menu is not working. Actually, the menu entries appear to be improperly linked to localhost (which is your own computer). You need to link them to the appropriate pages in a relative (to the home page) or absolute (http://...) sense.

Marko

[David Karp]

It works fine on my Firefox (v. 3.5.3). The menu items are not working on mine either.

[percepts]

Two major problems which are simple to fix.

There are still a lot of people using IE6. Pain though it is to make it compatible you don't need to pee off 10 to 15% of your visitors by not doing so.

Your header image file idplate.png will not display properly in IE6. Make it a transparent gif file with a matte the same colour as your page background.

There are still many people whose screen res is 1024 x ??? This is more than 50% on one site I manage. In other circles it may be less but still way big enough to worry about it. You have made the class highslide-gallery 1100 pixels wide which won't fit in 1024 pixels. You should change the width to 900 pixels which means you get max of 4 thumbnails across screen at the size you currently have. There are compatibility problems with margins in IE6 also but making it 900 which is 4x220 plus margin of error avoids them.

There also problems with the thumbnail borders in firefox and IE6.

[Preston]

The menu items 1-5 give a "The address is not valid" error in IE 7. In the source code, the URL's show as http://, which are not valid addresses. May I assume you haven't generated the pages to which the menu items will point? If you have, you'll need to add the relevant URL's.

Also, and this is a small point: When I click on your name, I get an e-mail message form, which surprised me. I was expecting to be directed to a new page with contact info and (perhaps) an 'artist's statement and e-mail link.

The images display nicely for me. Nice work, too!

-Preston

[Ed Richards]

Sorry folks, I should have said to concentrate on the images. The links out are just dummies.

I have been wrestling with the width - I hate to have too much scroll, but I appreciate that there are still folks out there with small monitors. I will play with that and see how it looks.

[Oren Grad]

Taking a peek via IE8 running on Vista, nothing to add to what's been said above re the web page mechanics.

The jpgs are showing very little to no detail in the deep shadows, but there's no way for me to tell from here whether that's just the tonal scale you want or whether there's some calibration or profiling issue.

[Ed Richards]

Hi Oren,

Do you mean that the shadows have gone to black, or that there are no shadows because the images are too flat? Are others seeing the same problem? It is a hassle because monitor calibration does not really apply in browsers.

[bob carnie]

Hi Ed
The images look quite fine on my screen , I like the work would love to see more.
The shadows are very deep but look great.
Bob

Hi Oren,

Do you mean that the shadows have gone to black, or that there are no shadows because the images are too flat? Are others seeing the same problem? It is a hassle because monitor calibration does not really apply in browsers.

[Steve Feldman]

Hi - As Bob (above) said your images look fine. Thumbnails are a bit dark. When I hit the "1:1" buttom the enlarged image is way too large to see all at once. Need to arrow over to see it all. I'm on a PC w/ Vista and IE8.

[percepts]

As I said before, you have problems with image borders. I suggest that you make the following changes to the css.

You need to make your highslide-gallery width 1130 (908 if you want it to be good for screen res 1024 width).

Then you need to change box to be 204 pixels wide and you need to make frame be 204 pixels high.

Doing this will put a darkish grey border around the thumbnails and stop the dark/black shadows from bleeding into the background. It will also give a selection highlight to the border as the cursor moves over it. The spacing is then correct. Prior to these changes you have specified a 2 pixel border with not enough space to put it in.

[Oren Grad]

Hi Oren,

Do you mean that the shadows have gone to black, or that there are no shadows because the images are too flat? Are others seeing the same problem? It is a hassle because monitor calibration does not really apply in browsers.

Gone to black or very close to it. Overall the jpgs have a very hard tonal scale, with brilliant highlights achieved at the expense of the rest of the scale. The perceptual effect is strengthened by the presentation on a dead black background with bright white captioning.

I just saved a few of the jpgs and opened them in Photoshop for a look. The extent of the dead-shadows look correlates nicely with how abruptly the histogram is clipped at the bottom. So it's not just a profiling/calibration thing.

Again, nothing wrong if that's the effect you want.

PS: I played with jpg 399p a bit more. If I put it through four or five rounds of -50 contrast adjustment I can open up the shadows in the lower part of the structure and also make the highlights a bit more legible too, but the areas under the roof overhang are still clipped hard - nothing there to work with. And, of course, the rest of the picture suffers because of the extreme adjustment. 1000p clips very hard at both ends, and there's nothing I can do in PS to bring out much more - the information isn't there in the file.

And a final PS: I went back to your older Katrina gallery. The files have similar characteristics, but the dark gray rather than black background is more forgiving for the viewer. Well, this viewer, anyway.

[Ed Richards]

New set of files now posted. 4 across, border on tumbnails, titles added.

Oren,

Do not know what to say. Lightroom generates this from my full size tiff print files out of photoshop. Those print the way I want them, and display just fine. The JPGs are optimized for the WWW a bit, which might affect the contrast a little, and certainly the sharpness. They look OK on my monitor. They look better in a controlled enviroment such as PS. Are there real blacks - yes. I admit, I was corrupted by having a chance to look very closely at a number of AA prints, and realized that I should not be afraid of black.:-) I am still a print maker, however, and have not taken the trouble to further optimize these for the screen. I may work on that as a Lightroom preset at some point.

[percepts]

Now if you change the ccs box class to the following, then the layout will work in IE6 exactly as it does in Firefox etc without shifting anything. Currently in IE6 you only get three thumbs across but this fixes it to four.


.box {
PADDING-RIGHT: 10px! important; PADDING-LEFT: 10px! important; FLOAT: left! important; PADDING-BOTTOM: 20px! important; MARGIN: 0; WIDTH: 204px! important; PADDING-TOP: 0px! important
}

[Ed Richards]

percepts = just loaded your code. give it a try.

[percepts]

that looks much better in IE6. Four thumbs across. The only other thing is the header image which is png. That has a grey background because IE6 does not support the png alpha channel (transparency). It does with a gif file or you could include a black background with your png header file then the thumb page will look identical to more modern browsers.

[percepts]

The thumbs and images do have very deep shadows but the highlights are pretty well maintained which makes the images look quite punchy. Not overly though.

[Oren Grad]

Do not know what to say. Lightroom generates this from my full size tiff print files out of photoshop. Those print the way I want them, and display just fine. The JPGs are optimized for the WWW a bit, which might affect the contrast a little, and certainly the sharpness. They look OK on my monitor.

Then I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Get the HTML mechanics nailed with the good advice you've been getting about that, and you'll be all set. :)

[John Berry]

Hi Ed
The images look quite fine on my screen , I like the work would love to see more.
The shadows are very deep but look great.
Bob
Same here on my new mac pro and the big herkin' monitor. Loaded in less than a second. I can see stuff going on in the darks. Except for the one in the large building, dark on both sides ( which I think looks appropriate ), I can find all the detail I need to be satisfied. I did not FEEL anything was missing. I would rate the presentation as well above average.