| Author | Message | ||
  John Preston |
Jane, There is a way to match monitor (and printer) color profiles. It's usually under "Display" on your Settings. There are several profile choices so I guess it would be best if all parties concerned in the jurying-slide processing used a specified profile. | ||
Jane Freeman |
I still use the slides the old way and hope to one day learn to use the computer enough to crop and send in a digital to be made into a slide or just sent as a jpeg to the society...but my question is this...every monitor is different and would all have to be calibrated the same to show the same colors...how is this done? I know my computer is darker than it should be and see my husbands and it is lighter and his colors are weird...will there be a way to calibrate so everyone is seeing the same thing? I know there is one juried show now that is using digital and I wonder will they see what I see? I am not sure they will. | ||
marie |
There's a post from a few weeks ago that mentions at web site that will produce slides -- http://iprintfromhome.com. Also, my local photo lab will produce slides from digital images. I simply give them a CD with my images, and they produce slides. The local site is a lot more expensive than the on-line site. | ||
Robert |
How would you make a slide from a digital image? | ||
dirtybird |
I think digital submissions should be allowed in addition to the usual slides. Final judgement should be done on the originals of course. Specifications should be drawn up as in slide submissions. I predict that the majority of art shows will allow digital photo submissions within, let us say, three years. The people who run these organizations are far to intelligent to sqander this opportunity. Look what happened to Kodax who managed to enter the digital age a little to late to get the most out of it. | ||
Anonymous Painter |
First, it's not yet hard to find a slide projector -- on Ebay! (Good idea to use the 'advanced search' and specify something nearby: Shipping usually costs much more than the projector itself!) Dake, if you're not joking, resolution (on PCs anyway) is the number of dots, and the refresh rate. So your monitor has a resolution which might be, for example, 800x600 (the units are pixels, which you can think of as a dot which can be a certain color) by 60 (can update 60 times per second). As applied to an image, resolution usually means dots per inch (dpi); 72 dpi is the Mac standard, and the IBM standard is 96 dpi. As to the best artists being unable to enter digital photos -- won't happen. Those who write books about art are already dealing with a digital process (publishing). So if they don't know how to do it themselves, they've hired an assistant who's handling that for them. About 10 years ago I was trying to work with writers who also hadn't learned about e-mail and attachments, etc., but most folks are up to speed now. Those who aren't, if they really are good at the art side, have someone working for them to handle the business side (including computers). Or, in some cases, the spouse does the business-related work. | ||
marie |
I agree. Many of the best artists don't deal with computers. | ||
Eugene |
George and Marie and All, A Natonally known artist friend of mine, signature AWS, and numerous other societies, has published two best selling W/C books-- knows how to make slides or how to have them made-- but he doesn't even own a computor. He's a wonderful artist but thinks a floppy disc has something to do with back aches. I'm sure we'd lose him and many others, including me. | ||
marie |
The day will come for electronic submissions, but we're not there yet. Artists will adapt over time, and we will develop tools to to help with the submissions and judging on the back end. | ||
George |
Marie, Ah! I see your point. I believe Artists will adapt. The first competition that puts it to the test (requires e-images instead of slides) will spark the change. Some day it will all be done with e-images, but how long before the full change over takes place is really the only real thing we don’t know. | ||
marie |
I am more concerned about gifted artists who would not enter shows at all because they don't have computer skills. I am not as concerned about excessive image manipulation. Last night I was thinking about the show for which I just did the slides. There were eight artists I know fairly well. Two of them would have no problem dealing with electronic images, one doesn't know how to deal with them now but would figure it out if that was what was required. The other five would probably not have submitted anything if we required digital images. Of course, that's just my own idle musing. It's not necessarily what would happen. | ||
George |
Marie, If you know that watercolor societies reserve the right to disqualify any submission that doesn’t match the submitted image why would you say that we might have shows with the most skilled computer wizzes, not the best artists? Isn’t that a contradiction? | ||
marie |
Eugene, digital photos can indeed be enhanced. In fact, I find that many of mine need to be manipulated a bit to make them look like the originals -- but that's probably because of my lack of skill with the camera. Almost invariably the white of my paper comes out blue, regardless of how I set the white balance on the camera. There is software to detect whether an image has been enhanced. I understand that scientific journals are beginning to use it in some circumstances. There is always a danger that the image is not a true representation of the image, but that danger exists with film as well as digital images. I believe most watercolor societies reserve the right to disqualify any submission that doesn't match the submitted image. In our state watercolor society, we always check the actual submissions against the slides to make sure they match. >> We may have shows with the most skilled >> computer wizzes, not the best artists. I agree. Tachee, I also agree that it would be very nice to be able to upload your submissions via the web. As I was writing a previous post, I began to think that it's actually quite doable. | ||
tachee |
i have often thought that there should be a web site for artists to up load for a show. judges could be anywhere in the world to view. need to chat- use email. that would be easy. welcome to the www. | ||
Eugene |
Digital photos can be "enhanced" and altered. Isn't there danger of jurors selecting a piece that is not a true representation of the watercolor? We may have shows with the most skilled computer wizzes, not the best artists. | ||
Dake |
What does resolution mean? | ||
marie |
I simply don't have much confidence in the ability of people to deal with getting the images correct electronically. From past experience, I would expect the majority of images would be disqualified. The best way to do it would be to write an application that would check the image size and type when the image is uploaded and immediately reject anything that didn't meet the requirements. Then, hook it into PayPal, so that you don't have to match up the images with the payment. It wouldn't be difficult, but I'm not planning to write it any time soon. | ||
George |
Marie, you’re just making excuses! Very tight requirements are specified, by the society hosting a competition, for how slides are to be labeled. The same kinds of tight requirements can be worked out for e-images. As for artists who can’t do e-mail – many artists have trouble with the slide requirements too. | ||
marie |
My experience with the auction last fall was that over half of the people who tried to email jpg's to me, even with good instructions, couldn't manage to get it right. It was really chaotic. I would call them and ask them if they could send me something at higher resolution, and they would ask me what 'resolution' meant. | ||
marie |
Most of the time I use an on-line site -- http://iprintfromhome.com. I simply upload my jpg's, tell them how many copies I want, and in a few days my slides arrive in the mail. They have very good instructions on getting the right resolution and color calibration. I haven't had any problems with resolution from my 4 megapixel camera. I can't tell any difference between the digital slides and the slides shot professionally from film -- as long as I have good originals. | ||
greg |
a lot of artists may not be a Savvy as us.... sending email may be the perfect solution. | ||
John Preston |
I'm curious why a jury would need a CD. Couldn't they have you send jpegs to an e-mail address? Seems it would be easy to specify format, image size and resolution in the prospectus. | ||
greg |
Photographers are artists just like any other artist group. They have their traditionalists as well. film won't die, they won't let it. It may become harder to find or more expensive because of less competition, but it will be there. | ||
Eric |
Marie, how do you do that? (Have slides made from digital images) Does the quality of the image on the slide from the digital source look inferior to a "real slide"? If so, that would seem to be a big disadvantage for entering shows. | ||
marie |
Nikon recently stopped production of film cameras for consumer use. If I remember the numbers correctly, film cameras, which represented 16% of their sales in 2004, dropped to less than 3% of their sales in 2005. Having just finished chairing the slide submissions for a national show, I would be a little daunted by the logistics of accepting CD's for a show. Slides can easily be labeled with the entrant's name and the the title of the piece. If they get out of order, you still know who submitted what. It's easy for the judge to flip through the slides and rearrange them, and drop the accepted pieces into a new carousel. I can just imagine getting 400+ CD's, with files named 0985348.jpg and so forth. You don't what the image is or who did it. Or worse, they send you 3.5" floppies when you don't have 3.5 drives anymore. And then I'm sure people would send all kinds of formats -- tifs, bmp's, WordPerfect documents, and heaven knows what, which may or may not be readable by your software. I handled for the submissions for an on-line hurricane relief auction last fall, and you wouldn't believe the variety of file formats and resolutions. And then you don't know what kind of software the judge has, if any, to view the image. And how long does it take the judge to swap CD's every few images. By the way, it's easy enough to have slides printed from digital images. I do it all the time. | ||
George |
Good topic!! Watercolor competitions are way, way, behind the trends. Slides are a major pain in the butt. My guess is that it will take a long while for the watercolor competitions to move away from slides because the competitions are mostly run by traditionalists. | ||
greg |
Canon is releasing a camera that does both, Nikon may already make one. They still make turntables.. there are already less CRT televisions, all going to LCD and plasma. Eventually film cameras will be gone, but it will take a while. You will be sending in photo CD's in the near future, instead of slides. The HARDEST thing to find is a slide projector! | ||
Eric |
I heard that one of the major camera manufacturers will not make film cameras any longer. I can't remember which one, maybe Nikon? Anyway, it appears that digital cameras will push film to extinction. However for art contests and shows, you still see requests for slides. When do you think they'll all accept digital? Is it still worth it to have artwork made into slides? I'm starting to feel archaic bringing slide film in to be developed. |
