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February 8, 2008

Friday Feathers

Here's a bit of a sunshine for early February: the American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) in its bright yellow attire.

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I'll never understand why the male birds are prettier than the females. However, in the case of this Goldfinch, it endures a wardrobe change in the winter and looks very much like the dull and drab female.

On a photography/color/technical note, I noticed a color difference in the photo after I uploaded it. I did a screen grab of the image as it appears here (on the left) and the original (on the right marked with a yellow dot) image opened on my desktop.

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The photo on the right is brighter and more detailed than the one on the left, which means that the photos I've featured here aren't rendering the way they should. *shrug*

Cindy

Comments

"I'll never understand why the male birds are prettier than the females."

The females are more drab as they have to look after the young and therefore need to be less conspicuous.

It's a shame that the original picture doesn't show - I have idea why. Lovely shot again, Cinders.

Brain matter deposited by: zed on February 9, 2008 6:36 AM

I have NO idea why.

Brain matter deposited by: zed on February 9, 2008 6:37 AM

Nice shot, Cindy :)

As for the technical issue, I suspect it's a colourspace issue.

The linked URL for this comment has an example for you to look at.

I'll show you a few tests to run through next time we catch up to confirm or deny my theory.

Brain matter deposited by: Greg on February 9, 2008 8:52 AM

Zoe - thanks for the explanation. Glad you like the shot though. :-)

Greg - thanks! I'll check out your link.

Brain matter deposited by: Cindy on February 9, 2008 4:14 PM

Greg - I checked out the link; your example is a side-by-side comparison of the photo in different browsers. My example above was the original photo as it appears in Photoshop against the Firefox browser.

Brain matter deposited by: Cindy on February 9, 2008 4:18 PM

Unfortunately, it's caused by the same thing - inconsistencies in colour rendering between colour managed applications (Photoshop, Safari) and non-colour managed applications (Firefox, pretty much every Windows application).

I've confirmed the image does suffer from this problem - the good news is it's easily remedied.

I'm half way through a blog post on this topic - I'll give you a crash course on colourspace next time we catch up if it's before to post is published.

Brain matter deposited by: Greg on February 9, 2008 8:43 PM

kinda frustrating to say the least, Miss. Audubon.

Brain matter deposited by: RONW on February 10, 2008 1:54 AM