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Connie J. Bagot

Monitor Calibration

Calibrated my monitor last night with the Spyder. I desparately need to know if I have improved things or made them worse. To me, most of the images I see (contest winners, editor's first picks, etc) now look too dark and blue/red. So here is the same image processed before and after calibration. Please let me know which photo looks better---more realistic color and better exposure. The after photo looks much better to me so I fear that it may look too light and yellow to everyone else.

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July 07, 2007

- Bob Cournoyer

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What does the cow think? Which one looks like what you saw that day? Not trying to be smart, but I've never seen that cow before to know what it should look like.. :-)

Bob

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July 07, 2007

Connie J. Bagot

Okay. The image that was processed before calibration looked great to me before I calibrated the monitor. Now it looks too dark and contrasty, a little too blue/red. The image that I processed after calibration now looks fine on my monitor....but if I had seen it before calibrating the monitor it would look way too light and yellow and too low contrast. So what I am seeking is which monitor calibration produces a photo that is more appealing in color/lightness/contrast----in a general sort of way on a variety of monitors. Hope that clarifies things.

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July 07, 2007

- Gregory LaGrange

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In between would like better. A little darker but not with as much contrast of the first. But isn't one of the main principles of calibrating is to have the print match the screen.
If you print it and it matches the screen, couldn't that mean the calibration is right but maybe you just made it too light in processing.
It does look a little yellow, but do you see that on your monitor? Like Bob said, did the cow look less yellow than the picture of it?
You have to start with an untouched photo. How close to what you shot does that look? Then, if you do anything to make it look like that, how does it print?

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July 07, 2007

Connie J. Bagot

Either photo of the cow looks exactly like the cow when I shot it----depending on how my monitor is calibrated---but not both at the same time since they are quite different. I just wanted to know how they looked to other people. In between is an answer that works for me.

I shoot raw and preprocessing on both of these was identical----basically the auto settings in the camera raw conversion. The second photo, after the spyder calibration, does not look too yellow and low contrast on my calibrated monitor. The first photo does not look too contrasty and blue/red on my uncalibrated monitor. So, depending on how my monitor is adjusted, both photos look natural and fine to me...but there is a lot of difference between the two photos. Printing is not really an issue---the printer can be calibrated to either display so that the output matches what I saw when I took the photo. Depending on the paper and the ink even a singly processed photo can look vastly different on my printer.

The issue is displaying the photos on the web for others to view. I don't want to display the uncalibrated photo if 90 percent of my viewers will be wondering why it is so dark and contrasty.....or conversely display the calibrated photo if 90 per cent of my viewers will be wondering why it is so flat and yellow.

Rgb monitor calibration is based on a standard....so that we all can view approximately the same thing when we look at any given photo. My original monitor calibration is a visual calibration using Adobe gamma. The second monitor calibration is a mechanical calibration based on readings by the spyder. I was prepared to move forward with whatever calibration the spyder made on the theory that it is more accurate than my eyes. But even the monthly winners look a little dark, contrasty, and blue/red now on my monitor. So I wondered if the spyder calibration might not be so good----or maybe I was just so used to looking at things the way that I had the monitor calibrated before that normal doesn't look normal to me anymore. So I posted the two photos with a question: What looks best to you on your monitor?

So, what monitor calibration process do you use?

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July 07, 2007

- Gregory LaGrange

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I don't. I just adjusted the color and brightness until it looks right.
Other websites I visit look fine, prints come out looking fine. Works for me.

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July 07, 2007

Carol Teal

Connie, on my monitor the first (uncalibrated photo) looks best. The calibrated one does look sort of flat. The first one might be just a bit contrasty, but it still looks more like what I imagine the cow would look like. However, my monitor has not been calibrated either, but my photos do print almost the same as the screen. It really makes me wonder how my images look to others, too, and especially the judges because I had the chance to view mine at some schools where I substitute teach. They had the flat LCD type monitors, and the colors were horrible! Even the B&W photos all had a grayish-blue tint. Being they were school monitors, I am sure they were not the best models, but I just wondered how many people had similar monitors and were perhaps viewing my photos with nearly the same result. I can say that my screen produces results that look very smilar to what I see and the prints come out very smilar also. And I sent some off to a lab and the prints came back looking like what they did on my screen so that made me figure what I see must be fairly accurate.

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July 07, 2007

Robyn Gwilt

Connie I haven't calibrated my screen, but my pix seem to be the same colour when printed by my local store, as I see. I think we're all faced with this question, I kind of prefer the first image, its more punchy - but I guess it would depend on the light on the day you shot it, as there are days, when things look 'flat' in which case the bottom one might be more accurate - Kind of goes with what Greg says about an in-between. What I find quite interesting is that you shoot RAW, and are still faced with the same questions as I'm faced with as a HiRes Jpeg shooter. I find the processing too fiddly, but achieve pretty pleasing results. (And no, this is not to start a RAW vs JPEG argument, just an observation!!)