Hi folks,
I have problems with the quality of my photos.
I load them up from my camera on my desktop pc where I downsize and edit them for web presentation. And I am rather satisfied with the results when viewing the images on the CRT-monitor of the desktop pc.
As the latter isn´t connected to the internet, I usually burn the photos to show on a CD to transfer them to my notebook.
And there comes the dissapointment: Although they look still still fine when the CD is viewed on the CRT-monitor, they look poor on the notebook´s LCD-monitor (from CD and after I have loaded them up): Noise is increased, colours are bad, rather cold and blueish, and width-to-height ratio is distorted towards larger y.
However, most of your photos posted on the boards here are of fine quality when viewed on my notebook. Does anyone have similar experiences? And what can I do about it? How could it be prevented that we see pictures of different qualities when viewing identical picture files on our individual monitors? Is there any simple protocol I could follow when downsizing and editing photos to avoid this dilemma? (I am not very experienced in digital editing).
Asks
Betty
who will appreciate your answers very much indeed. Thanks in advance.
Advice needed, quality problems on different monitors.
Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau
Have you calibrated both of your monitors recently Betty? Ideally using something like a Spyder, but you can do a cheap test as I do using the following because it is free 
!:-
http://ludens.cl/photo/montest.html
Here is Spyder:-
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/arti ... r2pro.html
DaveW
!:-http://ludens.cl/photo/montest.html
Here is Spyder:-
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/arti ... r2pro.html
DaveW
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rjlittlefield
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Betty,
It is very common for colors to "go bad" when viewed on a different monitor. Even calibrated monitors will look wrong when the room lighting changes, say from daylight to incandescent. That's because people tend to see colors by comparing them with whatever else is in the scene, rather than against some absolute standard.
But this feature can work to your advantage also, as follows.
First, make a small collection of pictures that look good on your laptop. Write those to CD and move them back to your desktop system. They will serve as references.
Second, be sure to do your picture editing in a screen that is neutral gray, especially right around the picture. Photoshop's standard background is RGB = (128,128,128) -- an excellent choice.
Third, whenever you edit your own pictures, compare them side-by-side against the reference pictures to help detect color, contrast, or brightness differences that may become problems on a different monitor, even if both pictures look OK on your desktop.
It is common for notebook LCD's to be cold and bluish compared to CRT's, but since you say that most of the forum photos look good, I wonder if perhaps your CRT is set to be warm and yellowish? In any case, the procedure I describe above, using a gray surround and reference images, should help to make clear what you need to do differently.
The changing of width-to-height ratio between CRT and LCD is a bit unusual. What that must mean is that one or the other display device does not have square pixels. You can easily tell which one it is (maybe both!), by using your photo editor to draw a square, N x N pixels, and simply measuring the screen image with a ruler.
My guess is that your CRT is off. The pixels on CRTs are laid out by analog deflection circuits, which can drift (or be set) quite far from their standard before anybody notices. (As with color, people are not very sensitive to width/height ratios except when comparing two things. If we were, we would be intensely aware of some problem when viewing a picture obliquely.) If the problem is with your CRT, then quite possibly you can fix the problem just by adjusting the height and/or width controls until the ruler against the screen says that N x N is square.
I hope this helps. FWIW, color management is a common and difficult problem and will likely remain that way forever -- or at least until all of our artificial lighting perfectly mimics daylight (and there is quite a range of even that!). For internet consumption, really about all you can hope for is to get your pictures balanced about "average", which means that they'll look pretty good on a wide variety of monitors although maybe not perfect on any.
--Rik
It is very common for colors to "go bad" when viewed on a different monitor. Even calibrated monitors will look wrong when the room lighting changes, say from daylight to incandescent. That's because people tend to see colors by comparing them with whatever else is in the scene, rather than against some absolute standard.
But this feature can work to your advantage also, as follows.
First, make a small collection of pictures that look good on your laptop. Write those to CD and move them back to your desktop system. They will serve as references.
Second, be sure to do your picture editing in a screen that is neutral gray, especially right around the picture. Photoshop's standard background is RGB = (128,128,128) -- an excellent choice.
Third, whenever you edit your own pictures, compare them side-by-side against the reference pictures to help detect color, contrast, or brightness differences that may become problems on a different monitor, even if both pictures look OK on your desktop.
It is common for notebook LCD's to be cold and bluish compared to CRT's, but since you say that most of the forum photos look good, I wonder if perhaps your CRT is set to be warm and yellowish? In any case, the procedure I describe above, using a gray surround and reference images, should help to make clear what you need to do differently.
The changing of width-to-height ratio between CRT and LCD is a bit unusual. What that must mean is that one or the other display device does not have square pixels. You can easily tell which one it is (maybe both!), by using your photo editor to draw a square, N x N pixels, and simply measuring the screen image with a ruler.
My guess is that your CRT is off. The pixels on CRTs are laid out by analog deflection circuits, which can drift (or be set) quite far from their standard before anybody notices. (As with color, people are not very sensitive to width/height ratios except when comparing two things. If we were, we would be intensely aware of some problem when viewing a picture obliquely.) If the problem is with your CRT, then quite possibly you can fix the problem just by adjusting the height and/or width controls until the ruler against the screen says that N x N is square.
I hope this helps. FWIW, color management is a common and difficult problem and will likely remain that way forever -- or at least until all of our artificial lighting perfectly mimics daylight (and there is quite a range of even that!). For internet consumption, really about all you can hope for is to get your pictures balanced about "average", which means that they'll look pretty good on a wide variety of monitors although maybe not perfect on any.
--Rik
-
rjlittlefield
- Site Admin
- Posts: 23599
- Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:34 am
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