Apple's new OS defaults to gamma 2.2

The good news just keeps coming in. Apple's new version of Mac OS X - Snow Leopard - will default to the more standard gamma 2.2 instead of 1.8. Read it here from the horse's mouth.

Yes, webbrowser bliss is here

Google has just released a Developer release of Chrome for Mac OS X and lo-and-behold, it still color manages. I was afraid that there was a chance that google would disable it in the final releases, so I am very happy to see this happening. Chrome manages exactly like Safari in that it doesn't manage untagged images nor CSS colors. Firefox has a mode that will color manage everything and the upcoming Firefox 3.5 will have Safari-like management turned on by default. This will cause the situation to soon be that 3 major browsers will be color managed and the dinky exception will be IE. Excellent! Now if somebody could check out if the latest developer builds for windows also color manage (use this simple page) that would be excellent. The current release on windows doesn't but it would be superb if they are changing that too.

Here is the proof: Three color managing browsers on my Mac with a wide gamut screen (screenshot converted back from my display profile to sRGB so you will see the right colors too). The colors in these images are rendered exactly the same as I found out by substracting them in Photoshop.

More images from the forest

This is a followup on my last post. First is another image I took but only stitched today. It is a different angle at the same location as the yellow flower shot in the previous post.

I think I prefer the one from yesterday but this is pretty good too.

I also went back to the same place yesterday thinking that the wetness of the constant rain might be interesting. I mostly just got wet but took some interesting shots anyway. Here is a misty forest:

A jumble of leaves:

And some wet, yellow flowers which caused them to hang their heads.

The location with the crossed logs that I photographed the previous day was quite uninteresting due to the hanged heads unfortunately so I let that rest for another time. I am guessing that in a few days time all the yellow flowers will be blooming making it more of a sea of yellow than of green.

Lastly, Apex creek in the rain drizzle:

Amazing images of Sulfur mining in Indonesia

See where your sulfur comes from. As a chemist, I see the beauty in the sulfur and its red and yellow form, but those working conditions, hiking up and down into a volcano crater to the edge of a lake that is basically sulphuric acid mixed with hydrochloric acid, carrying big heavy chunks of sulfur with very little protection from the H₂S undoubtedly in the air are terrible. Beautiful images though.

Flowers in Enchanted Forest

I went on a quick afterwork photohike along the Apex trail that is one of my mountain biking favorites. When I rode it last Friday, I noticed many blankets of flowers along a trail in the Apex open space called "Enchanted Forest". This place is an uncommonly wet and dark forested area for the Denver foothills. I took my wooden panorama setup to make some high res imagery. I take 9 images at regular angles and stitch them together with hugin. This also allows for dialing in a shift, mimicking the effect you get with a tilt-shift lens on large format. Here is one of some sunflower like flowers (larger versions in the link):

These appear to be white violets. Many blankets of these were to be found along the enchanted forest trail.

At this point, I had to scurry to avoid getting completely soaked by an approaching thunderstorm however and hoped these would come out good. As they indeed did! These images will print great even at the very largest sizes my service offers.

Last but not least. Here is the flickr set.

Update: Some more images of this same place.