I've used SIG Pro to make a gallery and in Firefox/Safari it is working correctly ...

an example image is shown here for FF and Safari:



as you can see this is fine and is as should be ...

however in IE7



does anyone have any idea what is causing these dots as they are on a lot of the images and should not be?

the images themselves are clean so the problem does not lie there - it appears to be a problem elsewhere and is only happening in IE7

the link to the gallery on the demosite I am making is here:

mikemoatesrallyteam.com/demo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=92

this is using a rockettheme template and i am having to use lytebox to display due to the old favourite post on both here and their site of SIG not working correctly with mootools,RT templates etc. etc.

as always, any help appreciated  ;)

Yes I've had several instances of that happening and previously brought it up on the forum. I was told it is a glitch with Internet Explorer. That would seem to be the case as it only happens in IE, but seeing as the same images will display fine in IE outside of the Simple Image Gallery, you would think there would be a possible fix in the gallery plugin.

It's a problem because although it works fine in Firefox and you can always put a note on your site telling visitors it displays properly in Firefox, the fact is most people use IE. It may be Microsoft's software causing it, but I don't see it being a big problem in their eyes and it's unlikely they'll correct it in IE in the near future, so it needs Joomlaworks to look into sorting the problem out.

I've managed to fix it in every occurrence I've had simply by editing the images in Photoshop (I'm very experienced with image manipulation btw!). Basically the problem as far as I've been made aware is that when there are very dark areas in an image some conflict with the SIG scripts running with IE cause the browser to be unable to distinguish whether a particular pixel should be black or something else, so defaults to white! (that be not be techically correct!) Using that login I tried something in PS, it works but is time consuming...

What you need to do it open the offending image in SIG on the site it's installed on so as to use it as a reference for the position of the rouge white pixels. Then open the image in Photoshop and do a couple of things... first using the image displayed in the gallery as a reference, take the blur tool set to a very small brush size 1, 2, or 3 pixels, with 0% hardness, and blur each offending pixel. By blurring the pixel you are changing it from black to a very dark grey which the browser seems to be able to cope with. An additional option after doing that is to apply a very small amount of Gaussian blur to the image, and I mean SMALL, from 0.1% to 0.5% depending on the image, otherwise you lose the sharpness of the image. And sometimes it helps to reduce the amount of JPG compression. I've also sometimes used PNG24 instead of JPG, which seems to further reduce the chances of this happening.

The Photoshop fix DOES work, but is very time consuming so isn't cost effective and isn't the ideal solution. The only other solution if Joomlaworks don't come up with one, is to find a different gallery plugin that works with IE!

many thanks for the reply racinginstructor

i will give this some thought as although SIG is a great gallery component and its a doddle to use, as you so rightly stated to do your suggestion would be very time comsuming indeed even with the photoshop skills i too have :(

there are also issues using it with mootools in templates as well which adds more to user frustration at development time

will try using your suggestion of pngs as a kwik fix, and if that doesn't work then will investigate alternative routes to display galleries as it may well be i will have to look for another one if the guys here don't have a solution, which is kind of defeating purpose of buying it in the first place

thQ again for the reply  ;)

/// update ///

as a test i just added in the Easy eXtended Gallery and although initially the dots are there for < a second, they go away in IE7 which to me points to your suggestion of the problem being with the SIG scipts and the browser. thanks again for your advice, will run with this for the interim until new version of SIG arrives ...

I used Photoshop (actually Fireworks)to fix this issue by using the filter LEVELS.

Set the output levels from to 10-255 instead of 0-255. It does lighten up your photos a bit but it does get rid of the all pure black spots at once.

I used Litebox in this case. (Over a glassbox)