Frederick Ferdinand Schafer Painting Catalog

Notes on usage, browsers, and display requirements

  1. The color in the images should be considered representative, not authoritative. See the discussion of adjustments for more information on this point.

  2. The catalog does not use any exotic browser features and should display correctly on any World Wide Web browser distributed since 1995. The catalog makes no use of Java, JavaScript, cookies, or style sheets. It also does not use frames, but it does display large images in a separate window using the TARGET construction, which most browsers provide as part of their implementation of frames.

  3. The one-inch images (thumbnails) that appear in the indexes and on the description page of most paintings are designed for fast downloading and are intended for identification only. In most cases, a click on the thumbnail will lead to a three- by five-inch image that provides more detail.

    In some cases, the three-by-five image page will include a link to an even larger (11-inch) image for downloading. Some browsers that provide inline viewing of downloaded images may not work properly with the larger images. If you encounter that problem, the simplest work-around may be to save the image in a file and use a separate image-viewing application such as Preview (Macintosh) or qv (UNIX) on the saved file.

  4. The images are sized for a display with 100 24-bit pixels per inch in both directions, and they are adjusted for the sRGB color space, so they will look best on a display with gamma of 2.2 and color temperature (white point) of 6500 K. The images can be viewed with almost any color display, but displays that have different parameters will exhibit varying degrees of degradation. On a Macintosh equipped with an older Apple display that has gamma of 1.8 the images may appear somewhat washed out; it may help to turn down the brightness. Images placed in the catalog after January 1, 2000 contain ICC color profiles; these images have a note to that effect on the image page. Software that knows about ICC color profiles can properly convert colors to look approximately correct on any display or printer. As of 2008, the only web browser reported to take advantage of color profiles is Safari. Lacking a profile-aware browser, one can download the image and display it with a profile-aware application such as Photoshop. Alternatively, each image page contains a link to a set of industry-standard photographic targets that have been scanned and transformed into the same sRGB color space as the painting images, for calibration.

  5. This work is in progress and the organization of material below the home page is subject to extensive change. For that reason it is advisable not to make bookmarks or otherwise save copies of links to anything below the home page.

  6. All materials in this catalog are copyrighted. If you wish to use anything for other than personal study, please read the copyright notice first.


Subject indexes

Other indexes

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Apr 26, 2008, 13:36 MDT Comments, corrections, or questions: Saltzer@mit.edu