TeaGuardian.com: Photo Standards

As much as possible, we have tried to represent the visual characters of the subject as objectively and faithfully. This is especially true for the photographs in the Tea Selection Guide section. Other pictures, some of which may have been taken under adverse light condition, may have been dramatically adjusted for colour faithfulness, but there are imitations.

The colour characters and settings of your computer screen and your viewing environment may also affect the resultant visual perception of the photographs. In some older computers, there may also be certain limitations as to the range of colour they are able to render.

Special notes for the Tea Selection Guide section

Dimension

Above is a photograph of the dish that holds the tealeaves in the photographs. The actual dimension of the dish is as labeled. The full size photos in the tea description/review pages with this dish is near 1:1 ratio when the computer screen is set at 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution for 21” monitors, or 1024 x 768 for 17”, or 800 x 600 for 14". This is so designed such that the tealeaves can be visually represented as close to their real appearance as possible. However, because of the restriction in the given number of sets in monitor resolution setting, the final display dimension of the tealeaves can only be an approximation.

If your screen cannot be set at the required resolution, the size of the dish and the tealeaves may be different from this near 1:1 intention.

Leaf quality

Unless otherwise stated, the quality of the tealeaves represented in the rectangular dish is between rare, special premium to premium grade 2. Regular commercial grades, such as grade 1 or 2, may be documented in some selections for comparison reasons.

Infusion colour

The liquor in the photographs representing infusion colour is made with 3 grams of the tea infused in 150 ml of soft water at the specified temperature for 5.5 minutes. Deviations from this will result in other colours.

Infused leaves in the infused leaves photographs

The infused leaves are leaves infused at the specifications as in that for infusion colour.

Colour adjustment

If the photographs appear too bright, too dark, too warm (reddish), or too cool (bluish) on your screen, you may need to calibrate your monitor or display to see the real colour, if you care for the trouble. Some monitors come with hardware control for simple brightness and contrast settings. Some even with colour settings. Click <here> to see a good reference colour chart if you manually adjust the display with hardware controls.

All Macs come with a simple to use and basic calibrating software, which is good enough. It is within the display pane in System Preference. In PCs, it is in the display control panel. The steps are described in the Microsoft link: windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Calibrate-your-display. It involves a few steps.

Otherwise, this maybe a good link for the job: www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

To learn more about monitor calibration: www.northlight-images.co.uk/viewing.html

As for the photos themselves, some have been adjusted to more truthfully represent the real appearance of the leaves. Colour deviations happen in the raw shots when there are various technical flaws, such as the aging of the halogen photo bulb, inconsistency in light setting, the mistaken use of auto white balance, and inaccurate exposures. Our current resources do not allow us to set up a more permanent photo area for a standard lighting, which unavoidably creates differences in the resultant raw images taken in separate sessions. Therefore the need to adjust after the shots are made. We appologize if some people are bothered by the occasional inconsistency in certain minor white and grey areas of the photos.

To adjust the colour of the final photos, we put the tealeaves under daylight (5800°K) to match for a calibrated LED display monitor with 24 bits colour depth, which is similar to most modern better displays.