Thanks for all your hard work, it's great to have the FWW back!

Sorry, I should have been more clear. What I was referring to above as a "colour profile" is an ICC colour profile. See this page for more information on ICC profiles.

I have colour management turned off in Photoshop, however Photoshop's "save for web" still gives me the option to insert an ICC profile when saving as a JPG, but when saving in PNG format, it inserts the ICC colour profile without asking and there is no option to turn it off. This is why I think that it's something for people to consider as other programs may be doing the same or similar things.

Some notes about colour profiles embedded in images. This is a separate issue from colour calibrating your monitor/computer. The software that saves your final image to jpg may be inserting colour profiles with or without your knowledge. I highly recommend against this! Photoshop can insert colour profiles, but it is often unclear whether it's inserting one or not. I do all my post-work (re-sizing, signatures) in the Mac version of Photoshop 7/CS, so I can't speak for other programs. I'm assuming a colour profile can only be inserted if you have colour-calibrated your machine, but I'm not entirely sure about that as all Macs use some colour-calibration by default. Obviously I have a PC, but I never calibrated it as it has always been consistent with my other systems, and I always do a final colour check on the Mac before publishing.

I had a big problem with this a couple of years ago. Some background information: I run a website that provides my images as computer backgrounds, thus I was trying to make my images look as good as possible on -all- computers, not just ones I control. I embedded colour profiles in all my images. The end result was total colour chaos. Some computers ignored the profile, others used it but made the images look wrong. I even had inconsistencies within the same software package, where sometimes the colour profile would be used, and sometimes not, and Internet Explorer can be set to show images like they have a colour profile when they don't even have one! I ended up re-doing hundreds of images to remove the colour profiles.

I wrote a rant after I had the issue figured out, you can read it here. There are some example images there you can use to test your computer with.

Another thing I would recommend is to know your monitor. Look at your images on other monitors/computers. Visit a friend and have a look at your Renderosity gallery from there. Visit the library. Spend a buck and go to Kinkos. If you don't want to log into Renderosity from a public computer, upload a couple of images to one of the free hosting services. If your images look significantly different on other computers than on your own, maybe you have a problem.

It's been my experience that old CRTs often start losing quality. My last 23" CRT (purchased in 1998) was a colour nightmare at the end. Laptop screens are another source of problems, I suspect because the screens may be designed to be low-power, but that causes gamma issues and often a lack of saturation. I love my 12" PowerBook, but I would never ever do colour work on it; I just can't see subtle hues, even when I know they are there. Not all laptop screens are bad, for example the 17" PowerBook has very nice colour reproduction, as do some high-end PC laptops, but it's something to watch for.

sofie-filo wrote: >Quote from Kid_Fisto (Craig Collins): "According to UF, this shouldn't have >rendered, nor should i have been able to open UF. i never bought it, but it >still works after 210 days on the eval copy. weird." (Mar 19, 2006). > >Only KID'S are showing us that sort of behaviour; in my humble opinion. A comment on this comment. It took me almost two years to decide to buy Ultra Fractal. If it had stopped working after 30 days like it says, I probably would never have bought a license for it (and then gone on to buy version three, and likely one day soon version four). The complexity was just too overwhelming at first, and until I started to master it, I didn't want to pay for it. Given the fact that the program doesn't actually stop working after the 30 day trial period (no hacking required), something Frederik Slijkerman is undoubtably aware of, and that Craig isn't really making much use of the program as of yet, I don't really see what the big deal is. Maybe if we help Craig learn to use UF, he will buy a license.

Message edited on: 03/24/2006 21:23

For what it's worth, I ran UF on a Mac under Virtual PC for years, however when the Macs evolved from OS9 to OSX the performance of VPC went down the toilet bigtime. On the same machine, I found it to be something like 5x slower under OSX than it was under OS9. The only MacOS native fractal programs that I really like are KPT Fraxplorer/Fraxflame, but they're a tad pricy (now part of KPT Collection). I never found anything else that was even remotely suited for creating "art" (as opposed to mathematically oriented fractal images). I eventually gave up on using my Mac as a fractal platform and bought a fast PC, but I can't see many people doing that, especially a beginner. That said, once I got a PC I stopped looking for Mac-based programs and settled down with UF and Apophysis. I wish your friend luck. Blatte

I use three programs in rotation; UF, Apophysis and KPT Fraxplorer. I used to use KPT Fraxflame but that was before I discovered Apophysis. I like being able to trade off programs, especially when I get into a rut. Lately I've been having programs making anything I like in UF, so it's nice to have something else to work with. Also, different programs give you different results and a different process. I find that UF is very complex and takes a lot of effort, whereas KPT Fraxplorer is more akin to doodling. Both are fun though.