We have a judge for the March contest

You're the best.

Hi, Will we be seeing more galleries other than the four March galleries currently listed? Also, will Lance be judging from the Flickr site instead of the RAW galleries since those four galleries currently do not include all of the photos submitted. Those galleries probably only have 200 photos while you mentioned that 300+ were submitted. Also, I noticed my entry was missing. :-)

Thanks!

How are the photos viewed during the judging process? Are they printed, or are they viewed electronically? If electronically, what application and what type of computer and monitor are used?

The reason I ask is because a few months ago, I noticed that my submission looked much "muddier" when I looked at it in the gallery on my computer at work. I eventually discovered that the difference was due to the different "gamma" curve setting on my Macintosh at home versus my PC at work. I've since re-calibrated my Mac to use the standard PC gamma setting. I'd encourage others to do the same... the reasons for the Mac's standard setting being different are purely historical, and Apple is finally planning to move to the PC setting in the next release of MacOS.

As another example, my entry this month has a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means that if you're looking at the pictures in the online gallery, the sides of the picture get cut off in ways that I have no control over. All of this leads me to wonder how the judges at boston.com are looking at the pictures, because it can make a fairly big difference sometimes

Hi, Dave -- We view the images on a 24" PC monitor using the Windows XP Pro OS. I download all of the photos from Flickr at Large size -- usually 1024 pixels horizontally or vertically. If a Flickr user has fixed her settings so that her photos cannot be downloaded, then the size we are forced to grab is just 500 pixels wide or tall.

We look at all the photos at those original sizes. They are not stretched or shrunk or distorted in any way. And all of the photos are viewed the same way, so there is no advantage or disadvantage to anybody.

We do not use Flickr to view the photos, and we don't use the RAW Flash galleries that I build. I download the photos to a folder on a Globe/Boston.com internal server.

The judges go through the photos once using Windows' slideshow feature; then they look at them all again using the filmstrip view. Occasionally we'll open a photo in Photoshop if a judge wants to see it larger.

As we go through the photos, we move them into "Yes" "No" or "Maybe" folders. We always have more than 50 in the "Yes" folder, so we go through those again, eliminating photos until we're left with 50. We end up going through the photos several times.

Finally, the judges look at the "Maybe" and "No" folders again to make sure they agree with their original assessment of those photos. Then they review the Final 50 in the "Yes" folder one last time.

Keep in mind that the judges we use are very experienced at this -- in many cases, they have judged dozens of contests in their careers, under all sorts of circumstances. I've been very impressed with the care and thought all of them have brought to this process. It's been very interesting for me!

Hope this answers your question.

Teresa,
Thanks. So it sounds like I wouldn't need to worry about the aspect-ratio issues, but gamma correction might still be a problem (the JPEG format doesn't preserve enough information to display the image correctly if it was originally saved on a different computer with a different gamma setting). With some pictures it really makes a big difference.
There's a Flickr discussion about this here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/discuss/72157603987904902/

Here's a more technical explanation (not for the math-phobic!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

As I noted before, Macintosh users can avoid this incompatiblity altogether by re-calibrating their system with the standard PC setting (2.2) instead of the current Mac default (1.8). To do this, go to "System Preferences" -> "Display", then click on the "Color" tab followed by the "Calibrate" button (it will then lead you through the calibration process).

Teresa that is a phenomenal explanation of whats going on. Thanks so much for the detailed walk through. Looking forward to the top 50 Gallery soon!

Judging jpegs on monitors is not perfect, but is now the norm. If you think that we photographers have a problem, think about the painters and sculptors who have to submit jpegs of their work for jurying. When the judges go through hundreds of submissions, they typically only spend seconds on each piece before reaching a decision, especially in the first round. And many are based on a single round. Those with technical problems would be the easiest and first ones to be dumped.

The best calls would inform the applicants what exact size/resolution/aspect_ratio to submit, and how the jpegs would be viewed. But currently, these are not common. When no info is provided, I typically do the following:

- If the jpeg is not in a srgb color space, convert it to the srgb color space. In Photoshop, this should be done in a certain sequence of steps for the conversion to come out well.

- Set the jpeg image size to about 600 x 900 pixels, at about 72 ppi. Keep the file size under 100 KB.

- Optional: sharpen one more time after the conversion and sizing.

Good advice for competitions, fairnsquare. Another issue for some in seeing their photos accurately represented on monitors is the changing ambient light in whatever room their monitor is located, or even loss of calibration on the part of the monitor itself. I bought Pantone's Huey last year, and it works very well. It works on both PCs and Macs. I try to calibrate my monitor once a week; you also can set it to adjust for room light regularly throughout the day. Of course, if I kept my PC in a cave, with little or no ambient light, I wouldn't have to worry about this so much!

By the way, for our contests here on RAW, I prefer that photogs allow all sizes on their Flickr accounts; I download the Large size, 1024 pixels wide, for display in our full-screen galleries.

I learned my submission lessons from being a submitter, as well as a juror. The perspective from two sides of the fence is very educational. Attending a workshop by a group of curators on dos and don'ts, and the process also was helpful.

Calibrating a monitor is useful in many ways, for example, it will help matching your monitor images with your prints. However, the vast majority of the world's monitors are NOT calibrated. So your images may look fine on your own calibrated monitor, but may look very different on others' monitors.

Whether you calibrate your monitor or not, you should at least make sure its settings, e.g. contrast, colors, etc., are correctly set up. Read your monitor's manual to learn how to adjust its settings, and use this free utility to test how well your monitor is displaying:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Video-Tweak/Nokia-Test-Pattern-Generator.shtml