Copying pictures as shown on this web-site

Most visitors of this web-site will be aware of how to copy pictures from the web for their private use. In Microsoft's Internet Explorer e.g. a click with the right mouse button on a picture reveals a context menu; in this, you just left-click on the “Save Picture As...” line, and finally on the “Save” button of the “Save Picture As” window that appears. Naturally, this also goes for the square zoom-detail pictures. Images copied in this way may be freely used for all sorts of non-commercial purposes. (We'd appreciate being mentioned as the source – just by referring to IWACC – but that's no obligation, of course.)
 
Remains the fact that our web-site pictures are small and “coarse”. Yet for some people there's an advantage attached. Proud owners of an image processing application that doesn't ignore embedded colour profiles – like most browsers do – will get a better impression of the colours. One such application is Adobe Photoshop. To be sure, the colour profile (8-bit sRGB) of our wee web-site images is quite a bit less impressive than that of our real pictures (16-bit Adobe RGB in older pictures and 16-bit ProPhoto in younger ones), but the advantage is that more image rendering applications will know how to handle it. Moreover, it'll fit better within the limitations of most displays. Mind you, those same displays generally will be “uncalibrated”, so it remains something of a lottery.
 
Finally, a tip (no doubt quite redundant for the experienced). After editing an image in an application, it's better not to save it again in the JPEG format (as a *.jpg file). That method uses a type of compression that isn't loss-free, so it degrades the image. It's happened already once to our web-site pictures – well, we did it. Every time an image is saved in JPEG format, more gets lost. This doesn't occur with formats as TIFF (*.tif) or PNG (*.png); the image file then will turn out a bit bigger, of course, as no compression is applied. (With some applications it's possible to save 8-bit TIFF format files with LZW compression, which is loss-free.)
 
NOTE When copying files as described in the first part of this text, images are not degraded. Image content then isn't saved once more, but copied without change.