Help: Digital images look faded after years

A
Posted By
ants
Dec 16, 2003
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242
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Does this ever happen to you? I have some good quality JPG images that I kept from many years ago. Today I took the CD out and looked at them again. A good number of them look crappy. Faces are too dark or lines aren’t smooth or color isn’t right. I think I wouldn’t have kept them if they look this bad. Then some other images from different sources are just fine.

If the images haven’t changed, then it’s because of software or hardware. Back then, I had Windows 95 running on Pentium 166 with maybe an 8M ATI card. Now I have Windows XP
running on a P4 266Mhz with a 64M ATI AIW card in 24Bit
color. Acdsee has always been my choice for viewing.
Surely it was an earlier version back then. Can you think of something? Or my taste for digital photo advanced?

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MR
Mike Russell
Dec 16, 2003
ants wrote:
Does this ever happen to you? I have some good quality JPG images that I kept from many years ago. Today I took the CD out and looked at them again. A good number of them look crappy. Faces are too dark or lines aren’t smooth or color isn’t right. I think I wouldn’t have kept them if they look this bad. Then some other images from different sources are just fine.

If the images haven’t changed, then it’s because of software or hardware. Back then, I had Windows 95 running on Pentium 166 with maybe an 8M ATI card. Now I have Windows XP
running on a P4 266Mhz with a 64M ATI AIW card in 24Bit
color. Acdsee has always been my choice for viewing.
Surely it was an earlier version back then. Can you think of something? Or my taste for digital photo advanced?

I guarantee you that the digital data has not changed. If the jpeg image decodes correctly, that is proof that the bits are exactly as you stored them years ago.

More than likely your monitor settings are different now. This may take some effort to characterize, but it is a solvable problem. —

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net
L
Littleboy
Dec 16, 2003
True what Mike says, digital data doesn’t loose it’s integrity in the way that images will look faded 😉

More likely, your impression of good imagery has changed over time!

I was recently browsing through an old Computer Arts cd, looking at picture samples from about 12 digital cameras. They ALL look like crap compared to today’s standard, or even today’s minimum 🙂

Greets

Littleboy

"ants" wrote in message
Does this ever happen to you? I have some good quality JPG images that I kept from many years ago. Today I took the CD out and looked at them again. A good number of them look crappy. Faces are too dark or lines aren’t smooth or color isn’t right. I think I wouldn’t have kept them if they look this bad. Then some other images from different sources are just fine.

If the images haven’t changed, then it’s because of software or hardware. Back then, I had Windows 95 running on Pentium 166 with maybe an 8M ATI card. Now I have Windows XP
running on a P4 266Mhz with a 64M ATI AIW card in 24Bit
color. Acdsee has always been my choice for viewing.
Surely it was an earlier version back then. Can you think of something? Or my taste for digital photo advanced?

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