More from Mount Galbraith

Mount Galbraith Golden Vista. Buy a print.
Assembled from 7 handheld images Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16 mm at 11 mm, f/11, 1/160s, ISO 200

This is the same tree as I showed a few weeks ago. It's a nice vantage point overlooking Golden and Denver as you can see and I thought it would make a nice panorama. You should really see it large which you can by clicking on the image above. I stitched it together using the outstanding (and free) hugin software. The individual images were developed in Lightroom 4 beta and I did a little post in Lightroom 4 beta too.

Clouds and tree

Contrast, clouds, orange. Buy a print.
Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55 mm at 32 mm, f/8.0, 1/160s, ISO 200
Flickr image. Google+ post.

This is in local open space park Mount Galbraith. Most of the trees in this area burned last year (picture in this blog post) and so all the trees look quite forlorn. I processed this in image in LR 4 beta. This gives just wonderful final quality but is still quite slow.

Dutch perspective on San Francisco

Dutch perspective on San Francisco. Click for bigger. Click here to buy a print. Image on flickr. Google+ post.
Technical info. D300, Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 at 11mm, f/8.0, 1/640s, ISO 200. Processed in LR 4 beta.

This was taken on a sail boat ride on the San Francisco bay when we were returning to harbor. The title of course is a pun.

SOPA and PIPA protest

As many may have noticed, yesterday I joined in the protest against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out this website. I realize that may have inconvenienced visitors but I felt a strong statement had to be made. These onerous proposed laws would have really put a damper on free speech and open expression. For an interesting (albeit a little too conspiracy theory for me) perspective on all this read this article.

Chrome suddenly color managed

This one snuck by me. I have complained many times in the past about deficiencies in browser color management. Chrome and Firefox are seen wavering back and forth all the time. I recently lamented the fact that Chrome was not color managed. However, I happened to open it recently and noticed that the color was not off as I was used to on my wide gamut screen (Chrome version 16.0.912.75). In fact it looked 'normal'! So I quickly whipped up a comparison between browser and the gold standard in color management: Photoshop. The screenshot was converted from my monitor profile to sRGB for web display.



As you can see, contrary to my previous post using Chrome 13, it is now color managed! This is great news as we now have three browsers that are color managed, at least on Mac OS X. I understand that on Windows, the latest Chrome is not yet color managed, which if true, is a shame. Nevertheless, this is a great development and a return to what I called "web browser bliss" years ago, but what was dampened from that initial optimism since then because of regressions at Mozilla and Google. Here is to hoping that the last holdout IE, which still does not convert to the display profile as it should, will at some time join 21st century even if 2012 is a little late for finally doing what was proposed by Microsoft themselves in 1996.

Finally, by checking the icc v4 testing page in all browsers, I can now report the following for the browser versions current at the date of posting:

Browser	icc v2 compliant?	icc v4 compliant?	converts to display profile?	assumes sRGB for untagged images?
Safari	yes	yes	yes	no
Chrome	yes	yes	yes	no
Firefox	yes	no	yes (some v4 profiles work!)	no (yes with secret setting enabled)

In conclusion, if you are on a Mac and care about color rendering, I can now heartily recommend Chrome next to Firefox and Safari.