Help! iWeb is slaughtering my images!

[srf4real]

Why is it, I can spend hours in photoshop, save images with sRGB, move the finished files to iPhoto '08 and see exactly what I expected, transfer to iWeb '08 and see great results, then upload to my website and lose all the color and brightness of my pictures? >not a plug who would buy this crappy looking stuff< Just look at those dull greens and blues... no light balance... Am I doing something wrong? Is there a solution or workaround I can't figure out why this is happening and I would appreciate some advice from you guys... or am I just silly for expecting a free website to look good?

thanks for your reply!

 

[scienide09]

It could be that iWeb reduces the image quality during the export process to save space and bandwidth. I don't know if this is the case, not being very familiar with the behind the scenes processes of the iWeb program.

Have you considered trying thumbnails that link to larger images? Nevermind. I had another look and it's not that.

Edit: I'm also getting a rendering(?) problem with your opening paragraph on the page. It just trails off the edge of your template and the text disappears. Firefox 2.0.0.11 on WinXP at the moment. Possibly a CSS issue?

 

[srf4real]

Have you considered trying thumbnails that link to larger images?

Well it's more work for me, but at least the viewer could get a true representation that way. The thumnails on the iWeb site would still look drab, tho. With myspace I have grown accustomed to making images darker to appear nicely when uploading... maybe for now with iWeb I'll need to make them brighter and more saturated... let's see how many more copies of the same image is that I have to make? I just tested Navigator and the pics look a little better than they do with Safari, but still not true.!?

hmm. What's CSS? I should have known better than to try to be a web designer with zero knowldge/skillz.

 

[bankshot]

It sounds to me like iWeb is stripping the files of their embedded ColorSync profiles. This has been a source of major frustration for me -- not with iWeb in particular, but in general with trying to save images without embedded profiles in such a way that the saved pixel values reflect what they used to look like with the profiles embedded. So far I've found no solution. I might as well join and ask if anyone knows a way to do this?

For me, the process goes something like this:

• Import photos into iPhoto, which embeds a ColorSync profile
• Minor adjustments in iPhoto or more major edits in PhotoShop Elements, both of which honor and preserve the embedded profile
• Prepare the final, nice images for the web, often using a tool like Gimp, which discards the embedded profiles
• Upload photos to the web, where they will be viewed mostly by browsers without any support for ColorSync profiles. The colors are dreary and drab compared to how they were when I edited them.

Basically, I want a way to save the "appearance" or effect of the embedded ColorSync profile by manipulating the pixel values to be what they would be with the profile applied, and then save that result without the profile so that all viewers can see it in the same way. I've found no way to do this. The closest workaround is to take a screenshot of a window showing the ColorSync-adjusted image, but this is a hassle and doesn't work for the vast majority of images which are larger than the screen size.

Any ideas? If the pixels are displaying and can be captured by a screen shot, then surely there's a way to save this information without requiring the embedded profile. Very frustrating!

 

[srf4real]

I do know that photobucket displays my images well when linked or embedded in a web page... I just hate to leave all my copyrighted files on someone else's server that I have no control over, and I felt a certain amount of security using apple's iWeb to do this. I guess they're not there yet. Sure there is "my gallery" with iPhoto but then people have access to the original files as they view them. And of course most casual users have never bothered to calibrate their monitor other than the 'auto' setting. But that's another issue over which there is never going to be control.
Thanks bankshot for joining in, I thought I was alone in this frustration... Any power user/ digital photographers out there know how to beat this without making ten different profiles and sizes of every image you plan to post online!?

 

[scienide09]

hmm. What's CSS? I should have known better than to try to be a web designer with zero knowldge/skillz.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet. Used for stylizing HTML, a lot more powerful and easier to create dynamic websites without having to code everything manually.
iWeb is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design program. All of the HTML and CSS coding is done behind the scenes, and for basic web design for a beginner, you should be fine. I'm not sure if the rendering problem is there, in the additional (unnecessary) code that iWeb adds, but I suspect there's something there that Firefox does not like. The text issue I mentioned does not occur in IE7.

 

[ideagora]

It's in your preferences

Just go into your preferences in iWeb. Uncheck the box that says "Optimize images on import"...that should help you. It did for me.