Lightroom 2.1 RC

Lightroom 2.1 was just released as a release candidate on the Adobe Labs website. Read about it on Tom Hogarty's blog. This release promises to fix a nasty bug I discovered a while ago and reported to Adobe where the resolution of images gets lowered dramatically when you print (also when printing to jpeg). We'll see if it actually does this. It also supposedly fixes the auto-white balance crash and other perfomance and crash bugs. Time to check it out!

Rockwell likes Lightroom 2

Check it out.
Quote from his review:
"Now, with Lightroom 2's ability to do local corrections, it's probably all that even serious photographers need."

Well said indeed!

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.

Something to remember in your photography

"It's a poem not a police report"

Don't know who said it first, but it is very applicable.

I can't believe I haven't noticed this. Real color management in Firefox 3.0

I wrote earlier on how to enable color management in Firefox 3.0. It was great to see that finally a major browser next to Safari has color management, even if you have to go into a secret settings menu to enable it (see link above). At the time I assumed that the color management was just for images with attached tags. The same thing that Safari does. This would make Firefox, just like Safari, color foolish and causes lots of issues on Macs that are by default calibrated at a lower gamma than most windows PCs. However, and this was pointed out to me by outstanding photographer Greg Cope in a discussion on flickr, Firefox 3.0, with the color management enabled, color manages everything, CSS colors, text, and untagged images. If a page element has no attached profile, Firefox assumes sRGB. This is awesome and the absolute right thing to do. I tested it and it is absolutely true. If you have a Mac, enable this feature right away, even if you do not calibrate your screen. If you have a windows PC and you calibrate your screen, also enable this right away. On windows if you do not calibrate, the feature is not too useful as Windows assumes sRGB by default for the monitor profile. This brings Firefox quite a bit ahead of Safari and will make all web pages far better looking (no pale and too low contrast images anymore).