color discrepancies

[interpunct]

hi everyone -

i've been doing digital photo work for some years now, but there's one thing i've never gotten over: color discrepancy between different monitors. it drives me nuts.

is there really nothing that can be done to ensure that the way you edit a photo on your personal computer (and monitor) is the way it will be seen by others looking at your work? i just put up some new photos last night from my ibook, then came to work and looked at them on this dell monitor, and they look like hell.

frustrating, to say the least. does this drive anybody else nuts, too? how do you console yourself, or have you found some tricks i haven't heard of?

 

[compuwar]

hi everyone -

i've been doing digital photo work for some years now, but there's one thing i've never gotten over: color discrepancy between different monitors. it drives me nuts.

is there really nothing that can be done to ensure that the way you edit a photo on your personal computer (and monitor) is the way it will be seen by others looking at your work? i just put up some new photos last night from my ibook, then came to work and looked at them on this dell monitor, and they look like hell.

frustrating, to say the least. does this drive anybody else nuts, too? how do you console yourself, or have you found some tricks i haven't heard of?

Your Mac has a color-managed browser, your Dell probably doesn't. You can either display different pictures to different computers, or go with the default Windows Web colors.

 

[Westside guy]

In addition to what compuwar noted - if you don't use a calibration tool (like Spyder) on your monitors, images are going to look quite different on different monitors. This is especially true for images originally coming from a Mac, since the default Mac gamma setting is different than the default PC gamma setting.

 

[interpunct]

but even if i were to calibrate my mac monitor, that doesn't necessarily mean that my photos would look same on another non-calibrated monitor, right?

i've definitely looked into some of the calibration tools, but unless i'm misunderstanding, it's almost not worth it (except for a printing situation).

 

[compuwar]

but even if i were to calibrate my mac monitor, that doesn't necessarily mean that my photos would look same on another non-calibrated monitor, right?

i've definitely looked into some of the calibration tools, but unless i'm misunderstanding, it's almost not worth it (except for a printing situation).

Right, look at them in Firefox without color management turned on- that should give you pretty close to what a PC user will see.

 

[interpunct]

Right, look at them in Firefox without color management turned on- that should give you pretty close to what a PC user will see.

is there any way to reproduce this effect when editing? i edit in photoshop (on an ibook g4) so that photos look the way i would like them to on my monitor - it's mainly just disheartening to think that a large percentage of people are seeing a bad representation of what i originally edited due to being on pcs or pc monitors.

 

[p.luik]

is there any way to reproduce this effect when editing? i edit in photoshop (on an ibook g4) so that photos look the way i would like them to on my monitor - it's mainly just disheartening to think that a large percentage of people are seeing a bad representation of what i originally edited due to being on pcs or pc monitors.

You can go to displays in system preferences and under the color tab, using calibrate to change gamma and white point to more "PC friendly" settings. This will change the whole display so that you can edit using a different color profile. You can even save this setting for switching back and forth easily. Chances are you wont like how your mac looks on these settings.

 

[ChrisA]

but even if i were to calibrate my mac monitor, that doesn't necessarily mean that my photos would look same on another non-calibrated monitor, right?

Yes. There is no way out of this. If someone you don't know has a crapy monitor with the setting all wrong, everything he sees will look bad. But you can't control that. The best you can do is publish your work in sRGB color space. sRGB is pretty close to what a typical un-calibrated monitor does.

 

[interpunct]

Yes. There is no way out of this. If someone you don't know has a crapy monitor with the setting all wrong, everything he sees will look bad. But you can't control that. The best you can do is publish your work in sRGB color space. sRGB is pretty close to what a typical un-calibrated monitor does.

thanks! i just did some reading back in the forum and actually found my same sort of question, and did a lot of reading into adobe rgb vs srgb and the color gammas of macs vs pcs vs the internet. i can't believe i didn't know any of this until now.