Browser and Computer Settings In general, these pages are designed to load rapidly and look good on 640 by 480 displays. Still, this is a compromise and you may have to scroll vertically to see all of an image. Size is dependent upon detail. Images will look best if you maximize your browser's window. Minimize the button bar at the top. For best appearance, set your display for 24-bit color and, if possible, 800 by 600 pixels. Text and buttons will work best if you use the browser's default font. If buttons and descriptions take up too much room, try using a smaller font. Give your browser as much RAM as you can afford. Many of these pages have 250K in images, and allocating RAM will help load images simultaneously. Setting the browser's buffer to several megabytes allows you to download images and text from many pages, then log off and look at them at your leisure by navigating forward and backward.

Known Problems AOL Browsers: Older ones have a problem with JPEG images. Parts of the image will be offset in streaks. AOL's newer browser seems to solve this... mostly. News: There is a fix for this problem. I found out about it through the Imaging Resource Web site. Go to the preferences for the AOL browser and turn off download compression. The problem will go away; it's caused by compressing JPEG files, which are already compressed. Internet Explorer: Tested versions are consistent in slightly distorting the dimensions of images. This only causes problems on pages where text and images are close to each other; the text winds up being on top of the image. Netscape Navigator: No known problems. WebTV: I got a chance to test many of these pages with WebTV and was pleasantly surprised. It seems my conservative designs fit well, for the most part, with the restrictions of this browser. The big exceptions are the Sculpture Garden pages; these simply fall apart because WebTV doesn't allow horizontal scrolling. Instead, it turns the images into thumbnails and the text table into a narrow strip. To view these pages you'll need a computer and browser.

Site Information Human Touch Museum Made by Larry Nelson. e-mail: Larry lord_chaos@compuserve.com All contents copyright 1997-2000. Images have Digimarc copyright notices embedded. Images and text created by others are used with their permission

I have eschewed fancy graphics and animations in order to concentrate on high-quality images and text. Only if an image is essential to the story a page tells have I embedded it. Buttons allow access to optional images so that if all you want is text you don't need to wait. I also don't use thumbnail images, in the belief that it makes little sense to make you wait for an image twice. What I have done is work on each image to make sure it's worth the download time. This whole site has been through several cycles of testing, both for reliability and usability. Still, there are probably some leftover faults; I'd appreciate hearing about them if you find some. A project this size doesn't just happen. Many people have helped me with design and testing and I appreciate what they've done. A partial list of helpers includes: Don Tidwell for the initial impetus Computer Currents Magazine whose scanning article removed the mystery from a strange process Bert Adams whose "one page at a time" got the stalled reconstruction project going Lilibeth Quach Gabriel Murillo Eric Wahlberg Lorna McClellan who all let me watch as they worked through the beta files so I could find the problems Sandy Feet Larry Dudock Nita Stephens Janet Kolehmainen Robin Nobles whose kind words and encouragement make continued development possible

Human Touch Museum

Tools used in constructing this site My first computer was an Osborne 1. When, after six years, that poor thing finally quit I bought a used Macintosh. This Web site never would have happened without various Mac-based tools; I just want to get the job done, and the Mac does this. Computer: Power Computing Powercenter Pro 210 Specs: 192MB RAM; 2GB and 8GB hard disks; Zip drive, CD-ROM burner Scanner: Nikon LS2000 with Silverfast AI driver HTML Editor: BBEdit 5.0 (text editor with sophisticated HTML tools) Image editor: Photoshop 4.0 (faster than 5.0) Video capture: Sony DVBK-2000, with Sony DVcap software and Photoshop plug-in Cameras: Pentax LX with assorted lenses; Pentax WR90; Olympus XA2 Video camera: Canon XL1 About Scanning: My introduction to photo scanning came with a Hewlett-Packard Scanjet 2cx attached to an unruly PC. I didn't know anything, the software was clumsy, the preview window wildly inaccurate, but everyone has to start somewhere. Scanning is still an art in itself. I've learned that light depends on the direction from which you view it; walk all the way around a sand sculpture and take 20 images; the light will have a different color in each exposure. This site has many different kinds of scans. Here's a list of the various techniques. Other than Type 1, all scans are post-processed with Photoshop: color-corrected, levelled, dynamic range adjusted, cropped, converted to JPEG. Type 1: Scanjet 2cx, with Deskscan and LView. No longer used. Type 1B: Scanjet 2cx, with Deskscan to save as TIFF. Type 2: Scan by local lab with Agfa Duoscan. 35mm and 6X7. Type 3: Kodak PhotoCD. Type 4: Nikon LS2000, with Nikon Scan. Type 4B: Nikon LS2000, with Silverfast. This combination is best. Type 5: Kodak PIctureCD. Cheap, reasonably good. Type 6: Captured digital video. Notes on scanning negatives: Exposure is very important! An underexposed negative that will produce a reasonable print will be very difficult to scan. Otherwise, negatives are great. They have finer grain than transparency film, and their dynamic range fits within the scanner's range more easily.

Web Resources for HTML Developers

Robin's Nest	for writers: grammar, HTML structure, proofreading, reviews
Scanning	for image makers: essential information on optimizing Web images
Basic HTML	in a list of tags and what they do. For beginners
Interactive HTML	in a tutorial for beginners.
Proofreading	of your stories and files

utility.htm 2000 February 17