Massive new tartan range - please comment!

[Bob C]

I had the same problem with the large image not loading with IE7, running on XP Home.

I was glad to find my favorite tartan, Scottish Borderland, but the online swatch was MUCH darker than the real thing.

[Nick Fiddes]

I was glad to find my favorite tartan, Scottish Borderland, but the online swatch was MUCH darker than the real thing.

As I've probably said previously, reproducing tartan colours is a bit of a b****r. I comment extensively on this in my wee kilts & tartan book (below). We've done our best to choose the right shades and tones in auto-generating swatches for the STA thread counts. But frankly when doing this for around 10,000 fabrics you have to use a best guess as you can't colour pick for individual fabrics in the way that actual weavers do.

When there are woven samples available, we photo and use these, so at least people can compare these with the generated images. But these can't be totally accurate either, which is why it's best to get a swatch first if possible. But then these aren't available for woven to order fabrics! :-( Any ideas for improvements to this conundrum gratefully received...

Incidentally, you should find most of our generated images a little bit brighter and clearer even than the STA site itself, due to some clever extrapolation algorithms our techs came up with when generating them. For anyone interested in the technical problem, with any generated tartan image the thread colours need to be separated by a neutral colour which occupies at least a pixel. Using black darkens the image, white washes it out, and greys muddy it. You can't resolve this, but we think our solution is better than most.