Author: vdebolt

Review: Color Confidence: The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Color Management

Color Confidence coverColor Confidence: The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Color Management by Tim Grey from Sybex cleared up a lot of questions for me. Now I feel confident about selecting a working space when bringing my digital photos into Photoshop. Now I understand a whole lot more about color profiles, Photoshop settings, and color settings for my camera, my monitor, my printer and my scanner.

Teachers of digital imaging, electronic publishing and photography classes will find this book a wonderful resource, and Web design teachers will find multiple uses for it as well.

It begins with an explanation of color itself. Then there is a detailed inspection of how to set up Photoshop with color settings, working spaces, profiles, gamut settings and other color-related information explained in most helpful depth. Even so, this isn’t a Photoshop book, despite the fact that a lot of what a photographer does with digital photos happens in Photoshop. Grey gives equal attention to selecting the best monitor and setting up a color profile for it, to selecting a scanner and setting up a color profile on it, and to how to select and configure a digital camera. He suggests utility programs and hardware that are helpful to the digital photographer throughout and give reasons why various adaptors, devices and software programs are useful to color management.

Grey explains color optimization and various output options depending on whether the image is destined for print, web, projection or e-mail. The final chapter is about workflow, and suggests workflows that will help the photographer achieve predictable output with several process specific workflows including web, e-mail and digital projection. In addition to an index, the book also contains a glossary.

Tim Grey has written other books about digital photography and teaches at the Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging.

Tuesday at SXSW Interactive

Drop that MP3 – Musicians Sound off on the Web was the first panel I attended today. It featured Kevin Arnold of Noise Pop, Scott Andrew LePera of scottandrew.com, Annie Lin of annielin.com and Chris Wetherell of massless.org. They all seemed to agree that no model for music downloads will ever completely eliminate free file sharing by whatever means. At the same time they praised efforts such as Apple iTunes and Magnatune as finding good methods for downloading music online and getting money to the artist in the process. Wetherell is in three bands and also works for Google. He said that musicians need some format where venues and bands can aggregate information and share it to make booking easier. Openmikes.org was mentioned as an example of this concept. Lin is a law school student studying intellectual property law and also a singer and musician. She said that blogs by musicians were very helpful in building a fan base and in getting attendance at performances. Arnold talked about music subscription services that would allow you access to any music anytime and it wouldn’t have to be stored on your own hard drive.

I went to the Bruce Sterling presentation, or what Sterling called “The Bruce Sterling Rant-a-thon” because he basically is given 45 minutes to rant about whatever is on his mind. His rants are always well-attended and are a SXSW tradition. I don’t know if that is because he is so right on-the-mark with his musings, or because he always invites the entire audience to his house for free beer the evening of his talk. Sterling is now writing a periodic column for Wired Magazine, and also has a new nonfiction book about the future as well as a recent novel. He talked about globalization and about computer security and about the horrifying torrent of scams that pour into our inboxes every day.

The keynote speaker today was Jonathan Abrams of Friendster. Even though Friendster claims to still be in beta, it has six million members now. It is not anonymous. People use their real names. And people take their real-life social set and bring it online, where they connect to friends through friends through friends. Abrams said they have used a very simple design to appeal to a mainstream audience and that the site has proven the six degrees of separation theory. In fact, Abrams said in some places it might be four degrees of separation.

In the trade show today I talked to Mike Slone of inknoise, which is providing the SXSW blog site and has all kinds of personal publishing tools. When I reached the inknoise booth an woman from Baylor University was there ahead of me and I watched her build and configure a blog on the spot with Slone’s assistance. The interface was wonderfully easy and powerful.

Monday at SXSW Interactive

The day began with the Hi Fi with CSS panel. The panel included Doug Bowman of Stop Design, Dan Cederholm of Simple Bits, Christopher Schmitt of christopher.org and Dave Shea of CSS Zen Garden. Since I think CSS Zen Garden has transformed web design by showing people the power of CSS, I was glad to hear that this site won the award in its category in the Web site judging for SXSW. I haven’t heard if CSS Zen Garden won the SXSW people’s choice award, but if my daily vote makes any difference it surely will. Shea described how he wanted to make visually inspiring CSS designs, but also wanted to get community input into visually inspiring CSS designs as the impetus for CSS Zen Garden. Doug Bowman said he was experimenting now with the sliding door technique. He mentioned that experimenting with new techniques, even when they prove undesirable over time, helps to expand options and helps develop understanding that can be used in other situations.

A second CSS panel I attended was called The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and featured Brian Alvey of weblogs, inc, Kimberly Blessing of AOL, Doug Bowman of Stop Design, Tantek Celik of tantek.com and Eric Meyer of meyerweb.com. Celik announced that CSS 2.1 is now a full recommendation on the W3C site and contains many fixes and should be used instead of CSS 2. Celik, who is famous for some of his hacks, said to avoid hacks when possible. He suggested that when you absolutely have to use a hack to keep it as far as possible from your markup or isolate it in a separate style sheet. He had some examples at tantek.com/CSS/Examples. His presentation is at tantek.com. Eric Meyer handled the “Ugly” part of the presentation and showed some sites that had a number of common CSS errors, especially the overuse of classes. Doug Bowman, who originated some of the commonly adopted image replacement techniques said that they have proven inaccessible and he would prefer that people did not use them. Brian Alvey talked about using CSS in Content Management Systems and Kimberly Blessing described how AOL has moved to using CSS for formatting their pages.

Howard Rheingold was the keynoter today. His latest book is Smart Mobs. He talked about mobile computing, pervasive computing and collective action through technology. He is a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and spoke about the need to support that organization. His speech was highly intelligent and wide ranging. He talked about the effect technology that is mobile and even more powerful that many older computers is having on collective action.

I went to a User Experience workshop lead by Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path. He described a process for finding users’ goals for a site and then making sure that a site’s navigation and content match those goals.

It strikes me that many of the speakers this year have been deep and incisive thinkers, as much as they are technologists. Most of the speakers and panels have dealt with topics at a very high level of discourse that covered social interaction, political interaction, historical references, and scientific relationships in ways that expanded the discussion far beyond the boundaries of the Web or current technology.

During the evening, I went to the AIR Interactive awards party. My team did not win any of the AIR judges’ awards for accessibility, but we did win the People’s Choice Award (by an overwhelming majority!) Check the Knowbility web site for the list of winners in a few days, as I don’t want to mention them here until all the sites are available on the Web. Some of the sites in the contest haven’t gone live yet. There were 12 teams, not 10 as I thought yesterday.