Top ten most viewed immersive panoramas

As some of my followers will know, I regularly create immersive panoramas of places I visit. I often share these using google maps as that is one of the only places that can actually show them on a variety of platforms and that doesn't use flash or java, both defunct technologies with major security issues. Anyway, one of the interesting things is that a lot of people apparently see these spherical panoramas and hopefully enjoy them. I thought I'd share these with you as a top ten. Unfortunately I can't embed them in here easily so you'll have to click the links to be immersed in them and hit your back button to get back to this page. When you open one of the panoramas, remember to look up and down in addition to around you. Some of these have some nice surprises in them. Enjoy!

990,507 views: Tarn beneath Mount Toll

This is a small tarn above Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. This panorama has been viewed 990,507 times. Yes, close to a million times!

787,930 views: Emerald Lake

This is Lake Emerald in Rocky Mountain National Park closely after sunrise. This is one of the first of these panoramas I ever made but I only recently uploaded it to Google maps.

492,690 views: Santa Elena Canyon

The mouth of Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park. You can see Mexico across the river. This point is quite famous and photographed many times at sunrise. The Rio Bravo river forms the border between Texas and New Mexico and was often a crossing point in the old west for outlaws to escape the US and now it is a crossing point for illegals to come into the US. You can just wade over basically. Big bend is a place I want to visit again sometimes for photography.

291,152 views: Andrews tarn and glacier

This is Andrews tarn and Andrews glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park

249,557 views:Blue Lake, San Juan Mountains

This is Blue Lake in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride. There are several Blue Lakes in the San Juans and this is the one that can be reached by hiking from the Bridal Veils waterfall power station.

127,557 views: Blue Lake, Indian Peaks Wilderness

Blue Lake sunrise. This is Blue Lake again in the Indian Peaks. The view is as very few people see it. At sunrise and almost wind still.

85,227 views: White Pocket

This is White Pocket in the Paria Canyon/Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, an absolutely amazing place. It is hard to reach with many miles of deep sand road to get through but well worth it in the end.

65,350 views: Little Hawaii

Little Hawaii. This is a "secret" waterfall close to Telluride in the San Juan Mountains. It is right next to a very popular trail but you would never guess it's here if you don't know about it. Locals know all about it but will not divulge the location. The GPS location I tagged on this image is not where it is supposed to be in respect of that.

53,482 views: Mount Falcon open space

Sunset from Turkey trot trail in Mt. Falcon open space near Morrison, Colorado. This is one of my favorite mountain bike rides in the foothills.

36,638 views: Shelf Lake

Shelf Lake approaching storm. Shelf Lake is a spectacular high alpine lake in Rocky Mountain National park that is only reachable through off trail travel. I got chased away from here by some thunder and lightning that day.

I hope You enjoyed these. Be sure to click through and look all around you.

Emerald Lake full 360 degrees interactive pano

Enjoy:

Views: equirectangular panorama of Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park at sunrise. More images from this place: http://smu.gs/1n7yt8W #landscape #panorama #sunrise #photosphere by Jao van de Lagemaat

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.

New Chrome release

See here and download here (not really ;-) ). Still no color management like modern browsers such as Safari and Firefox have, even though Chromium is based on WebKit (the core of Safari). Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Also, even though it has WebKit roots, there is no Mac version.

Update. I just discovered that Google maintains a feature request forum. Color management is in Issue 143 and in another issue they updated it with the (misguided and bad) idea to ignore color profiles and do everything in sRGB. You can go to the first issue and vote for it.

Picasa 3.0 beta - no color management?

I just downloaded and tested Picasa 3.0 which google brought out in beta for the Mac. The program has an interesting UI and is nice and speedy. However, it does not colormanage. What the ...? Does Google realize that it is 2009? More than 15 years after color management was introduced to a main stream OS? Nowadays color management is a basic requirement for photographic apps. The absence of it makes Picasa useless for serious amateur or pro photographic work. Even worse, on uncalibrated Macs used by most consumers (i.e. the Picasa target audience), all colors will be wrong and images will have too low contrast making it even useless for amateurs. This is because out-of-the-box Macs come calibrated at the wrong gamma. Also, this means that if you have a laptop display, even if you calibrated and profiled it, you will always see the wrong colors. Therefore, my advice is to avoid this program like the plague until they fix it!

How Picasa displays two identical but for the color profile images (click for 100% image converted to sRGB from my monitor profile, so you can see what I see on my calibrated and profiled adobeRGB gamut display).


As you expect for color-stupid apps on a wide gamut display, the sRGB image is too saturated, and the prophotoRGB image looks green and too dark.

Both are quite far off as this image shows which is in sRGB for the web:


This is going to be even worse on a standard uncalibrated Apple laptop display, where everything is going to be severely desaturated and too low contrast.

Is Chrome color managed?

Google released a new very interesting-looking browser called Chrome. It sports some very intriguing features and is based on Apple's WebKit, the code behind Safari. Unfortunately, Chrome is only available for Windows (come on Google!). Also, Google has a very very poor record on the question of color management. Their (windows-only too) picture utility Picasa is not managed. Their web service even strips profiles (horrifying) when you upload images. It is therefore not surprising that Chrome appears to not be color managed, not even using a preference regardless of its WebKit roots. What is it Google? The Stone Age? No color management in a browser is getting ridiculous, especially when you basically get it for free and you're writing one from the ground up. It's even more important with the growing prevalence of wide-gamut LCDs and small-gamut laptop displays and more and more display manufacturers shipping not super correct but usable profiles in their windows drivers. I would be fine with a simple preference (preferably less hidden than that in Firefox). It would be great if somebody could check this out as I don't have a Windows machine.

Update: I checked it on a windows machine and there is no color management anywhere in Chrome. Giant leap backwards indeed. While some of the technology in Chrome is very cool and it does feel fast and I like WebKit being there, this is quite disappointing. But unfortunately, since Picasa is STILL not color managed (and there it really matters a lot even when nobody that uses it calibrates their monitors), I don't think Chrome will ever get color management. A little like Microsoft and their IE.