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Just can't seem to win...VIEW PHOTOS FULLSIZE
10 years ago
General
Since I've started taking fursuit photos for the community, I've had a lot of struggles. I'm still struggling to understand the mechanics of photography better so I take better photos. I still struggle to come up with creative ideas for poses and environments for those suiters to keep my photos interesting. I still struggle to try to keep a keen eye on the photos on my computer to understand the levels and contrasts of what I'm seeing. I still struggle with mastering the photo editing tools at my disposal to make the most of every shot. I'm even still struggling with file formats, which is what brings up this little rant today.
A few months ago, I finally came to realize precisely how bad .jpg files can look. They get artifacts sprinkled throughout, plus the image gets noticeably darker. When every pixel counts, and the competition for attention with fursuit photos gets more heated every year, having .jpg disparage an image becomes frustrating. So, I looked into what other formats I could use. Turns out I don't have many options for displaying my work. While .jpg is terrible, it is universal. Everyone and everything accepts and displays .jpg. However, better quality formats don't have widespread support at hosting sites. I had to dig up information on formats here and at Flickr, and I found just one format they would both accept other than .jpg. And that was .PNG.
Go figure, my primary editing software, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, doesn't support .PNG as an export option. For some odd reason, my secondary editing software, GIMP, does. So then I had to go back into Lightroom, find an export format that GIMP recognizes, and set up folders in my computer so I can export a photo to a folder, pick it up in GIMP, and export it again to a different folder. Viola! I finally have a method of using higher-quality images so I don't lose anything after spending all that time editing my photos.
And I hit a series of snags. First, the conversion process strips the image of native exif data. So when I upload the image to Flickr as a PNG, there's no automatic update for imprinting when the photo was taken. Well it's a royal pain in the butt, but I can go back into each photo and manually set it after conversion...except that PNG has this weird glitch where you can set the photo date, but not the time. So, when I update the photo taken date, it just puts in the photo taken time as whenever I'm currently editing the photo that day. And that's going to cause issues with photo arrangement and Flickr, since I used to organize sets of photos by when they were taken. I can't do that anymore.
Okay, that's frustrating. Next snag - PNG files don't support tags. For whatever reason, they don't. When I used .jpg, I would embed tags into each photo, so it automatically updated the tag information whenever I uploaded them to Flickr. Can't do that anymore either. So now I have to wait until I upload them, then edit tags. This means general tags, like "Anthrocon" "2015" and "Fursuit", which I applied to all photos as a group, I'll have to manually plug in each time. Okay, fine, pain in the butt, but moving on...
Next snag, discovered just last night. Well more accurately, I discovered it last month, but I only really caught onto what was going on last night. See, when I upload that crisp PNG photo to FA, it creates two differently-sized thumbnails of the image as .jpg. Well, for some strange reason, these PNG files, when converted to .jpg, are stripped of any edits I made to light levels and color saturation. The result is drab, washed out, and bland. The full-size image still seems to be okay, but these thumbnails look pretty much like the original image as shot by my camera.
Now that I know why there's such a disparity between the thumbail and image for my last six submissions, I need to figure out what I'm going to do about it. Having figured all this out today, I tried to update my last image "Dragon Trio", with a thumbnail directly converted from original to .jpg format. That worked...halfway. The smallest thumbnail updated to be vibrant like it's supposed to. However, there's still one version of the thumbnail that doesn't update because it is derived directly from the submission and not from a separate thumbnail upload.
The half-size image of each submission is still washed out and de-saturated. I never noticed this earlier because by default, I view all submissions immediately at full-size. The thumbnail for the gallery seems to be okay now, since it is probably derived from the custom thumbnail upload, but the image preview above the recent gallery submissions is still showing the de-saturated version of the image.
The only way for this to be fully fixed, it seems, is to continue my PNG process for Flickr, but upload a .jpg version to FA so this doesn't happen anymore. I can't let the first impression of my photos be that terrible, washed-out, and dark version. I can only imagine how many people just passed over those images in their inbox here at FA because they looked so bad.
So the jpg format which supports tags and keeps the imprinted exif data on time/date the photo was taken, I'll be posting here where both features are largely irrelevant. The PNG format which doesn't support tags or exif I'll be posting on Flickr.
A few months ago, I finally came to realize precisely how bad .jpg files can look. They get artifacts sprinkled throughout, plus the image gets noticeably darker. When every pixel counts, and the competition for attention with fursuit photos gets more heated every year, having .jpg disparage an image becomes frustrating. So, I looked into what other formats I could use. Turns out I don't have many options for displaying my work. While .jpg is terrible, it is universal. Everyone and everything accepts and displays .jpg. However, better quality formats don't have widespread support at hosting sites. I had to dig up information on formats here and at Flickr, and I found just one format they would both accept other than .jpg. And that was .PNG.
Go figure, my primary editing software, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, doesn't support .PNG as an export option. For some odd reason, my secondary editing software, GIMP, does. So then I had to go back into Lightroom, find an export format that GIMP recognizes, and set up folders in my computer so I can export a photo to a folder, pick it up in GIMP, and export it again to a different folder. Viola! I finally have a method of using higher-quality images so I don't lose anything after spending all that time editing my photos.
And I hit a series of snags. First, the conversion process strips the image of native exif data. So when I upload the image to Flickr as a PNG, there's no automatic update for imprinting when the photo was taken. Well it's a royal pain in the butt, but I can go back into each photo and manually set it after conversion...except that PNG has this weird glitch where you can set the photo date, but not the time. So, when I update the photo taken date, it just puts in the photo taken time as whenever I'm currently editing the photo that day. And that's going to cause issues with photo arrangement and Flickr, since I used to organize sets of photos by when they were taken. I can't do that anymore.
Okay, that's frustrating. Next snag - PNG files don't support tags. For whatever reason, they don't. When I used .jpg, I would embed tags into each photo, so it automatically updated the tag information whenever I uploaded them to Flickr. Can't do that anymore either. So now I have to wait until I upload them, then edit tags. This means general tags, like "Anthrocon" "2015" and "Fursuit", which I applied to all photos as a group, I'll have to manually plug in each time. Okay, fine, pain in the butt, but moving on...
Next snag, discovered just last night. Well more accurately, I discovered it last month, but I only really caught onto what was going on last night. See, when I upload that crisp PNG photo to FA, it creates two differently-sized thumbnails of the image as .jpg. Well, for some strange reason, these PNG files, when converted to .jpg, are stripped of any edits I made to light levels and color saturation. The result is drab, washed out, and bland. The full-size image still seems to be okay, but these thumbnails look pretty much like the original image as shot by my camera.
Now that I know why there's such a disparity between the thumbail and image for my last six submissions, I need to figure out what I'm going to do about it. Having figured all this out today, I tried to update my last image "Dragon Trio", with a thumbnail directly converted from original to .jpg format. That worked...halfway. The smallest thumbnail updated to be vibrant like it's supposed to. However, there's still one version of the thumbnail that doesn't update because it is derived directly from the submission and not from a separate thumbnail upload.
The half-size image of each submission is still washed out and de-saturated. I never noticed this earlier because by default, I view all submissions immediately at full-size. The thumbnail for the gallery seems to be okay now, since it is probably derived from the custom thumbnail upload, but the image preview above the recent gallery submissions is still showing the de-saturated version of the image.
The only way for this to be fully fixed, it seems, is to continue my PNG process for Flickr, but upload a .jpg version to FA so this doesn't happen anymore. I can't let the first impression of my photos be that terrible, washed-out, and dark version. I can only imagine how many people just passed over those images in their inbox here at FA because they looked so bad.
So the jpg format which supports tags and keeps the imprinted exif data on time/date the photo was taken, I'll be posting here where both features are largely irrelevant. The PNG format which doesn't support tags or exif I'll be posting on Flickr.
To my untrained eye, it's not the quality of the photo I see in the preview that catches my attention, but the subject matter. When I look at my recent submissions, if I don't see a subject I'm interested in, it doesn't matter how good the photo or art is, I don't go looking at it. Unfortunately, I only have so much time to spend online.
When I do look at a recent photo submission, and "view full size", it's awesome to see a crisp, clear, vibrant version of the thumbnail. And yeah, I am guilty of downloading really good photos for my screen saver or desktop background. If I repost a photo of me, I always credit the photographer.
BTW, you really do make Fu Manchu's colors pop!!
Unfortunately, by posting to Flickr, the photos don't get seen unless you post a link titled "latest photos from XXX" here or on some other site that is frequented by everyone.
As for Flickr, it's part of the compromises I have to work with. That site is specialized in photos, so it's easier to use and works better for them. Moreover, I needed a place to post photos that was, for a lack of a better way of phrasing this, out of the reach of FA admins. There are other upsides as well, though. Some of the better pictures on Flickr get way more views than my submissions here, which reinforces my belief that many people outside the fandom want to see photos of fursuits too. Flickr seems to have good mobile support, so people can easily tweet out a photo since Twitter has some sort of in-program Flickr support. So it's easier for people to share, and people can go and see it without having to worry about going onto a furry porn site to see fursuit photos.
The only thing I have to think about with Flickr is a trend I noticed where the first submission in a batch upload will get the most views, with a general trend downward until the end of the batch. So, I manipulate the upload sequence so my best photo of that batch ends up in front.
Don't get me wrong, I love seeing the photos on Flickr - They're almost always a higher resolution that the same photo on FA.
And yours always show Fu Manchu's colors very well!