New monitor... and now ? PP again ?

This thread is the perfect example of why monitor calibration is soo important. DO NOT waste your time re-editing the pictures till you calibrate your monitor. There is NO point. You will make them look good on one screen, and then when you share them, people will see a different picture than you.

Use some manual calibration and shoot in raw so you can redo the pics once you do get a calibrator. Personally I use the colormunki display and it works well for me. It also adjusts brightness based on the ambient light to help when the sun is down or it is cloudy, or I turn lights on/off, or the shades are closed.

Overall though, the pictures you posted look ok to me. Good colors and nothing blown out. Decent details in the blacks, good exposures. Right now, without a calibrated screen to work on, you will be beating your head against the wall. Maybe use a credit card or borrow one.

I just found this site, very cool for do it yourself LCD check up;

http://www.lagom.nl/lc​d-test/

Alarm wrote in post #15988849
The images are jpeg opened with irfanview

Color management enabled?
http://www.dpreview.co​m/forums/post/28346999

Re-editing makes little sense until you know "what you see is what you'll get…"

This clearly illustrates the risks that you run when you put anything up on the web.

An image may display perfectly on your screen and look utter sh*te on someone elses - there are just so many variables when it comes to displays and peoples settings.

The only sensible way to have someone see your work IN THE WAY YOU WANT IT TO BE SEEN is to have it printed out at a printer whose output you can trust.

Oh BTW - 99% of my work goes to the web and only a small percentage is ever printed out.

It seems silly to say this but work destined for the web spends a fraction of the time in post than stuff destined for print does - there is no point obsessing over the last bit of colour balance or detail enhancement for most web work as you have absolutely no control over what people will see. It took me some time to realise this but once I did it was liberating to my web workflow.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #15992877
I just found this site, very cool for do it yourself LCD check up;

http://www.lagom.nl/lc​d-test/

Love this site--and thank you, because I never bookmarked it in the past and went looking for it a few months ago to no avail.

Alarm,

I found a perfect opportunity to use one of my favorite quotes of all time: "You can't change the fruit if you don't change the root."

Unfortunately you have always been looking at your images in a state where they look normal (or "as intended" I should say) to only you. It would be like buying random shoes of different sizes all the time and just altering how many layers of socks you put on to make them wearable. The monitor are the shoes--make them fit. Also unfortunate, once you have the monitor displaying naturally-intended color and luminance, you will have to go back and re-do images. At least, however, you will have found your shoe size at that point--if you smell the crack I'm cookin'.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #15992877
I just found this site, very cool for do it yourself LCD check up;

http://www.lagom.nl/lc​d-test/

Thank you very muc. According to my eyes, i passed all the tests (well the monitor)

RandMan wrote in post #16000069
Alarm,

I found a perfect opportunity to use one of my favorite quotes of all time: "You can't change the fruit if you don't change the root."

Unfortunately you have always been looking at your images in a state where they look normal (or "as intended" I should say) to only you. It would be like buying random shoes of different sizes all the time and just altering how many layers of socks you put on to make them wearable. The monitor are the shoes--make them fit. Also unfortunate, once you have the monitor displaying naturally-intended color and luminance, you will have to go back and re-do images. At least, however, you will have found your shoe size at that point--if you smell the crack I'm cookin'.

I know what you mean. At the current point i stopped editing anything until i make sure that i have my new monitor calibrated.

As for the processed images... i will try to batch process every album and see if the results are satisfactory. Unfortunately its over 8.000 images, so i cant go through them one by one...

Nightstalker wrote in post #15995571
This clearly illustrates the risks that you run when you put anything up on the web.

An image may display perfectly on your screen and look utter sh*te on someone elses - there are just so many variables when it comes to displays and peoples settings.

The only sensible way to have someone see your work IN THE WAY YOU WANT IT TO BE SEEN is to have it printed out at a printer whose output you can trust.

Oh BTW - 99% of my work goes to the web and only a small percentage is ever printed out.

It seems silly to say this but work destined for the web spends a fraction of the time in post than stuff destined for print does - there is no point obsessing over the last bit of colour balance or detail enhancement for most web work as you have absolutely no control over what people will see. It took me some time to realise this but once I did it was liberating to my web workflow.

Well, i rarely print any of my images. I mainly have my personal album. I just want to have nice results for me but also for t he people i share the images with.

Alarm wrote in post #16002171
also for t he people i share the images with.

This is where you'll run into your big problems--the images on everyone's screens you're sharing with will look totally wonky.

I learned it the hard way so I will put this in big fat letters.

YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME PROCESSING PHOTOS ON AN UNCALIBRATED MONITOR.

How do you know that what you're looking at is even remotely accurate ? I could change a few settings on your new monitor and the same exact photos would appear completely different without any editing. You need a baseline and the calibration provides that baseline.

There's no way around it. Sorry.

If that helps, I am finding that iPad3 shows pretty accurate colors if the photo includes color profile. (Of course the brightness still needs to be adjusted but at least the colors are good). So it serves as a decent second guess screen.

I know it is a bit off topic, but i did not want to open a new thread.

Today i noticed that there is a constant flickering on text.

Is this thing normal ? You can see what i mean on the video here:

https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=_qYxPNvfYKg

I have reset the monitor, put the profile that was given with the drivers.
The monitor is connected with a VGA cable.

When i used another (i suppose better quality cable) , the flickering was almost gone, but there was still a bit to see there.

Do you think it has to do with the limitations of the VGA cable or a faulty cable/monitor plug

Sorry for reopening this thread, but i am still quite unsure about my monitor.

Today i checked the same image on two different monitors. While on the first i could see some black detail, on my Dell that black detail was lost.

Here is the image.

http://img5.imageshack​.us/img5/757/ja1v.jpg


So what happens is shown on the numbers:

1) On my second monitor i can see that there is a connection between those two parts, on dell not.
2) That region seems almost totally black on dell, while on the second monitor i can see there are two different blacks , light and almost total black.
3) I cannot see the trails of the tire on my Dell while i can on the second monitor.

This happens even if my monitor is to 90 or 100% brightness.

So what do you see? I don't to believe that this is normal. I surely believe that i lose of black information.

Quite visible detail in 1, 2 and 3.
If it looks solid black, your monitor is crunching the shadows.

Is it calibrated? If so: How?

René Damkot wrote in post #16153274
Quite visible detail in 1, 2 and 3.
If it looks solid black, your monitor is crunching the shadows.

Is it calibrated? If so: How?

Yes, on Dell it looks solid black, unfortunately...

I could not do any decent calibration through a hardware, just by following some guidelines in websites to configure the monitor.

There are actually not many settings that could make the blacks to be more visible. All the settings i tried on the monitor had no effect on the blacks.

I hope i am not sitting in front of a faulty monitor and its just a software issue.
I'd be glad following any suggestions. As for the calibration hardware, i could not find for rental and i cannot spent the same amount of money right now for something that i will use once every few months.

Alarm wrote in post #16154701
Yes, on Dell it looks solid black, unfortunately...

I could not do any decent calibration through a hardware, just by following some guidelines in websites to configure the monitor.

There are actually not many settings that could make the blacks to be more visible. All the settings i tried on the monitor had no effect on the blacks.

I hope i am not sitting in front of a faulty monitor and its just a software issue.
I'd be glad following any suggestions. As for the calibration hardware, i could not find for rental and i cannot spent the same amount of money right now for something that i will use once every few months.

Buy a calibrator, seriously. Although it's more to make colors correct, luminance still needs to be played with a bit.

In your motorcycle photo, e.g., #3 I can very well see the threads in tire on the right of the red area, barely the ones on the left - but still can see them.