tfttf321 – No Background Choice On Flickr | Photography Tips from the Top Floor

News about Chris’ voice: he’ll have to take it a bit easy over the next weeks. But rest assured, there will be a little something for you every week. Tips from the Top Floor is independent again – and open for new sponsorships! Inquire at info@tipsfromthetopfloor.com – We are getting ready to kick off the 2009 workshops, we’ll open those in January. If you are not yet on the mailing list, please sign up at www.discoverthetopfloor.com

Main topic today: Why isn’t it possible to present pictures on Flickr on a non-white background. Yes, slideshow presents on black, but both of those are such strong contrasts that they really take away a lot off the image viewing experience. Chris presents a workaround using the Flickr Enlarger website by Jay Williams (link below)..

Welcome the new TFTTF Pixie Johannes Schriewer! He’s helping with the editing the Tech Guy segments, so please give him a warm welcome in the comments, because without him, you wouldn’t get your weekly fix of the Tech Guy from now on.

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Show Links:

The Checkershadow Illusion – find out how easily your eyes are fooled!
More eye foolery at the laboratory of Dale Purves, M.D.
Put your pictures on a non-white background with Flickr Enlarger by Jay Williams
Johannes Schriewer, our new Pixie (make sure you leave him a welcome comment!)
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Garrett

whats the high pitched beep at 2:08?
Paul

The enlarger URL is not working.
Paul

The correct URL: http://enlarger.myd3.com/
Ravsitar

That beep is how Chris marks a spot that he needs to remove during editing. He missed it this time. So you can just rib him about it

I’ll fix the link for the Enlarger. It was late and I trusted the link I’d gotten from Chris and didn’t verify it was correct.
http://www.topfloorproductions.de/ Chris

Yeah, I totally messed this one up… consider it a free look behind the scenes of podcast production
http://craniac.net Steve Crane

If you use Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension there is a Flickr – Background color script that you can use.

It displays a vertical bar with a white to black gradient on the left of every photo page. When you hover the mouse over it all page content except the image and the gradient bar is hidden and the page background changes to the shade being hovered over. This allows you to choose the perfect grey shade for background of every photo.
http://www.topfloorproductions.de/ Chris

@Steve Crane – yes, I know about that, but it’s not a solution because it won’t give me as a publisher any control over how others see my images on Flickr, it’ll just change how I see the pictures of others.
http://martys-simple-things.com/ Marty

I left a message on your voice mail, but I’m afraid it was garbled, I write better than I speak.

Anyway, I used to do a lot of black and white printing (film). If the print was going to be mounted with a white overmat, it was fairly common practice with some printers to burn down the edges to compensage for the effect of the white border. By doing this, the tonality of the print looked uniform across the entire print rather than looking a little washed out at the edges.

Do color printers do the same? Perhaps this should be done for pictures bound for Flickr?