Viewing Large

[willie_901]

Recently I realized it would be easy to stream image slide shows on a 60" HD monitor (Vizio E60UD3 TV) located in a fairly large family room. These are essentially screen savers when the home theatre system is used for music. I change the slide show every few days.

Viewing these images has been an educational experience. At typical viewing distances I see elements of composition and content I had not seen viewing them on a 27" desktop monitor.

Here's what I learned.

• Some images just don't work well at large viewing sizes. Others work much better. This surprised me.
• Content, composition detail issues and sub-optimal aesthetic rendering decisions are much more obvious. Images that would benefit from a slightly different crop or cloning out superfluous distractions (e.g. a partial view of street light in a frame edge that appear to hang in space) are much more obvious.
• Converging verticals and transverse chromatic aberrations are more annoying at larger viewing sizes. For a while I used Nikon AI, AIS, AF-S and G lenses. These all exhibited significant lateral CA (red-green fringing) for out-of-focus objects. I find images from Zeiss ZM and FUJIFILM XF lenses to be much better than the Nikkors.
• Even though portrait mode images have about half the display area as landscape mode images, they are not compromised.
• The 4:5 and 1:1 format also work well despite not using even more of the TV display area.
• Composition for images with very deep shadow regions at the frame edges are compromised due to the unused display area's black background.
• Grouping similar images as diptychs or triptychs to use more or all of the 16:9 display is useful.
• Many of the images were scanned from 35mm negatives. Many of these are from ISO 800 film(FUJIFILM Superia). Some are from Tri-X. I feel the film-grain aesthetics are significantly more pleasing compared to desktop monitor viewing. Images I might mot consider printing based on the desk top display couldprint well based on the TV display. This was a pleasant surprise.
• Film images rendered from VueScan raw tiffs scans are superior to high-quality JPEG scans from a lab.
• Color hue, image contrast, highlight and shadow region rendering detail is well-retained even though I did not bother to use more sophisticated rendering calibration tools.
• Some monochrome images require a slightly different rendering approach compared to viewing on a desk top monitor. Film scans display much better in terms of grain. The same is so, but in a different way, for digital monochrome as well.

In the future I will view large images before I send any files off to be printed.

Details

I spent some time organizing thousands of images into genres and series. Some of the older images were re-processed as needed. I then selected sets of 80-100 images to create a dozen unique slide shows. I tried to be ruthless during the selection process. I viewed large images to complete the selection process.

The 3:2 aspect ratio images display at 45" X 29" (114 X 74 cm) landscape and 19" X 29" (48 X 74 cm) portrait. Cropped 4:5 and 1:1 aspect ratio images scale accordingly.

I created high quality, sRGB JPEGs with Lightroom (Camera Raw 9.1.1) using. The image pixel dimensions are 1920 X 1080 (~2 megapixels) or 1920 along the longest image dimension for other aspect ratios. This matches the native TV's pixel dimensions. I have not experimented with doubling the pixel dimensions which the TV can scale to UHD (pseudo 4K). The desk top monitor (Apple Cinema Display) was calibrated using the standard OS X tools. The TV display was not rigorously calibrated. The TV display parameters were slightly modified to optimize highlight and shadow region detail. This did not seem to affect digital video content viewing.

The images for each genre were manually ordered in LR Collections to achieve diversity and attempt an eclectic style. The Collections were exported into individual folders and then imported into the OS-X Photos app as Albums. The Photos app was configured to upload these albums to iCloud. Now the individual albums appear in the Apple TV iOS Screen Saver menu. The selected album set is downloaded in real time to a 4K Apple TV and then sent to the TV display via HDMI.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Viewing large is practical for sports. For photos, noting beats 8x10 print hold in hands.
IMO.

 

[rhl-oregon]

Thank you, William, this is (as ever) very helpful for digital/digitized slideshow considerations.

I have yet to implement a variant, but will be repurposing a Toshiba 19 as a discreet semi-intimate viewer for photos, opera streaming, and net movies.

The conundrum for us is a dislike of big screens taking up, with their black blankness, wall space more happily used for paintings and prints. However given the usual holiday doorbuster sales on flatscreens, we may get a 30+” for photos/opera/net flicks, if we can find a place where it isn’t just a baleful looming black monolith. My largest LR screen is an iMac 21, but seeing images @30x20 would be a useful proofing tool.

 

[shawn]

Expensive but also check out: https://www.meural.com/

Similar to a flat screen TV but it has a matte finish, gesture controls and can be *somewhat* controlled by voice through an Echo device. You can upload your pictures to their free service and create playlists and so on. Think it can also take a sd card for images too.

Shawn

 

[PaulDalex]

Uhm SD card?
Can one use it privately or is it yet another snooping device?

 

[willie_901]

Uhm SD card?
Can one use it privately or is it yet another snooping device?

SD or SDHC cards and USB flash devices are all viable options for image review. In fact, I could do this directly using the TV remote control.

Using Apple TV just happens to be convenient. All the content for this TV and in-wall home theatre speaker system comes from a HDMI-compliant source device (networked hub). The music content is selected using Apple TV apps. When I listen to music The TV comes on because the TV HDMI Cable is also a return path for all the audio data. These integrated solutions (Amazon Fire TV and Fire Stick, Roku Ultra, NVIDIA SHIELD TV, etc) all support screen savers that automatically start after a specified delay.

"Snooping" is an issue.

The primary threat is failing to use a proper password (e.g. yf6X4a,n}E8ga7p%QB) not using two-factor authentication. Otherwise image data is encrypted (link) so intercepting the image files directly from networks is not an issue (unless the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court grants a search warrant).

 

[PaulDalex]

Willie,
sorry I was unclear.
"It" was meant to refer to meural
I saw that one has to subscribe a photo hosting service.
In the past I often thought of arranging a slide show on a digital photo frame, but absolutely off line from any network and reading the files from an SD card or an usb connetted storage unit
Anyway I looked at the link and it is interesting
But, can we trust them?

 

[shawn]

You don't have to subscribe to their paid service. That just allows access to more artwork. Their free service will allow hosting your photos to be displayed on your Meural or you can plug a memory card into the device directly.

Many photographers use photo hosting services (Flickr, Smugmug, Zenfolio...etc...etc) so I'm not sure I see how this is any different?

You can certainly create an offline slide show using many different methods. But using hosting services adds additional functionality such as sharing between multiple devices (for example family members living apart), multiple contributors to the pool and so on and so forth.


Shawn