"Human Calibration"

I wish it would stop raining.

Anyway, time to do an experiment. Recently I've had a few comments about my images being overexposed. They look OK on my screen at home, which is calibrating using Spyder. So what I've done is created 2 images, one at what I think is the correct exposure and the other a little darker to compensate.

So which do you think looks right?

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id say right in between them both but if i was forced to choose, the lighter one looks better.

Depends. I don't think anyone would say either are "wrong" on exposure. This is really a judgmental call and depends on where you display it after printing (i.e. lower light calls for lighter version, more light calls for darker version).

howzitboy wrote in post #3436929
id say right in between them both but if i was forced to choose, the lighter one looks better.

Based on the appearance of the two images in IE7 I agree with howzitboy.

However, I downloaded them both and viewed them in Lightroom. There they look a bit different, with stronger colours, and the darker one has the edge. The lighter one does have a large part of the background blown, according to the histogram and does look a little washed out - but only a little.

But, before we can really judge, what colour space have you used to save these photos? I'm guessing it's not sRGB, but there is no profile within the images so I really don't know. If you've saved as Adobe RGB, which is my guess, they will look relatively flat and dull so trying to judge the relative merits of the two, if they are in the wrong colour space, is not really very meaningful.

Could you please confirm that they are saved as sRGB, and if not, resave them as sRGB and post them again?

Todd, the images are saved in sRGB

OK, fair enough. In that case I stick by what I said earlier - you want an exposure about mid-way between the two.