Topic: help needed - colour management

[LT]

Hello all - can you tell me what colour casts/ toning you see with these 2 pics on your monitor - also can you describe the tonality - blown highs/ blocked shadows - too dark or too light..  Been trying to sort out some colour issues on my main monitor and I think I;ve just made it much much worse.  these were edited in p'shop to have a certain toning, but on my laptop (BAD screen) they look totally different.  On my ipod touch they look about right, if a little flat. I'm not looking for perfect representation as I dont do anything other than web display images on a PC, but it would be good to know you're seeing roughly what I am.  I;ve tried using Adobe Gamma and Quick gamma and both seem to make it look Much Much worse.  I'm using an LG flatron monitor - any tips on what setting I should use etc?  thanks chaps and chapesses




[Sorry, image deleted during forum software upgrade. Please re-upload if so inclined.]

[db]

A man oh man. This is the hugest toughest topic in digital photography. I know just enough to know I know nothin', except to say set your white point and calibrate your monitor regularly with decent software- probably the spider type thing on the screen. And choose a set of colour prefs in Photoshop, stick to them and always embed colour profiles so the next person knows how to open the file. Also you may have just set your monitor perfectly, but if it was way-wrong before it will take you days to adjust your brain to the new look- especially white point temperature.

Watch out for viewing screens in v. bright rooms, It helps to have a dark area behind the monitor. Retouchers even use a black hood around the screen to keep stray downlight off the screen. (make it yourself with gaffa and a spray painted ol' wine box). And blow off that pretty goldfish desktop and screensaver and stick to an 18% grey workspace behind your images.

Even then, what looks good in Photoshop will probably look different in the IE/Firefox window, and a small jpeg saved is sRGB will look different from the bigger file saved in Adobe 1998 RGB.
arggh.

Anyway, all that aside. Right now I'm  on my lil home lappie (mac 12"powerbook) which hasn't been calibrated in 2 years.

It would be easier to judge if the two were similar scenes had a similar ratio of tones. No fair to ask us how without having the original to compare it too. Maybe#1 looks a maybe a touch warmer than #2 but I'm finding it hard to gauge, so I'm leaving colour alone for now. Maybe I'll look again on my editing screen at work..

Tonal range. #1 is suffering from having so much mid grey and not enough clean highlights to lift it. In fairness- this is likely the fault of the subject- all those pavers. The only pure white is in the dots and buildings across the bay, and there is a clean, maybe 90% highlight strip across the top of the low wall, middle distance. The blacks are heavy. I can follow the edge of frame almost to the corners before I loose the shadow detail all together. I'd like the shot better if the corners weren't so dark, but that's not what you're asking is it.. It's tough to put a muddy Holga shot up against #2.  and the eye also finds it hard to distinguish between contrast and resolution.

#2 looks tonally perfect on this screen. luminous, with subtle tones reminding me of a lightly toned Selenium. A lick of perfect black in the shadow side of the tree trunk,  lots of pearlescent  highlights in the clouds, and probably some 255 up there but not too much. Good shadow detail in the band of distant trees. Contrast is spot on, with finely wrought detail in the grass- did you bleach that spot just left of the tree?? Nice, anyway..

dunno if any of that helps tho..

[Photo_Utopia]

Hi
I downloaded your pictures and noted as I pulled them into PSCS that they had no profile, which is fine for most uses though I always embed sRGB as my browser (Safari) is colour aware-most aren't.
I would avoid using Adobe gamma, especially with LCD as I've never seen a good profile from that method, if you are sure you want to go down the colour managed route buy some kind of calibration  'puck' device.
What I'm seeing on my calibrated system is number one is warmish slight yellow possibly a little flat. Number two is cooler slightly magenta/blue like a mild selenium toned print and has a nice balance of tones/contrast.
If you want a fully colour managed workflow read the Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy Fred Bunting Real World Color Management Book.
Web display images are pretty hard as all you can do is balance your own equipment, embed sRGB and hope as few people viewing your images will bother.
Laptops aren't the best for really critical work either....
Mark

[Francois]

Boy, this is a hard one.
I know the white background on the screen is probably throwing the tones off quite a bit. And I'm looking at my calibrated screen which has pretty much no life left in it, so the calibration is sure to be off too...

The first picture appears to be warmer and much darker than the second. The only white in it is the little house in the upper right. Everything else is either shadow or mid tones.

The second one is just plain flat...

I bet these images don't use many web safe colors and have plenty of out of gamut spots...

When it comes to web display, it's always hard to strike a good balance since there are so many variables... The iPod probably displays fewer colors than an LCD screen (probably uses a TFT matrix).

Like Don said, the location of the screen will affect the output directly. I recently read that the room illumination should optimally be between 32 and 64 lux (or a gray card reading of 1 second between f/4 and f/5.6 on 100 ISO). Ambient light should be of the 5000K type and the walls painted either white or neutral gray without any colored posters on them to affect the screen...

I obviously don't have that either... sorry but I can't be much help either.

(I also know that the forum software strips EXIF tags and possibly does so with ICC profiles)

[Pete_R]

The first one has warm highlights and cool shadows but black around the edges is neutral. I don't see anything as plain white, not even the house, that looks warm as well. Looks like a cool tone print on a warm tinted paper. Overall looks a little dark but maybe that's the way you intended it to be. The darkest shadows have a very noticeable blue tone which I find distracting.

The second one looks much the same but overall a better balance.

When I play with settings like this, I find it helps to use a digitally generated step wedge with neutral tones as a starting point, something like this



This is a jpg which is of no actual use as the compression will have made changes to it. You need to use a tif file. Here's a tif version if you want to try it.

[david b]

Adobe Gamma is a nightmare ... I can recommend getting a Spyder though - I've had mine for years and it works brilliantly - and then making sure your colour settings in PS are correct and that you always embed a profile in your images.

[tinm@n]

This sounds horribly time-consuming and complicated like other digital stuff (HDR, unsharp masks etc).  If you have great images like these does this really matter ?  i.e. don't these display subtleties just disappear in the greatness of the photo itself ?  Or is it more to do with printing from digital files ?   

[LT]

hi all.  thanks for the replies. all very helpful

thanks for the step wedge type thingie peter - very useful.

Tinm@an - I use a lot of colour in my black and white pics through toning etc, and I'd like to be able to, as far as possible, show that to whoever looks at my work online.  I dont do digital printing, so it's not 100% vital that I get it perfectly correct, but it would be nice that most people can see it roughly as I intended it to be. Also, tonal relatioships are vital in my pics - Don here said he sees the bark on the tree in pic 2 as totally black, whereas is hold much detail on my screen - so that is a problem. 

I'll give Peter's step thing a go and sort out the black and white stuff, then maybe I'll give up on toning for web display. I'm not bothered enough to go as far as using a spyder etc, too costly and not much benefit to be gained by it for my purposes.

BTW - the first is a fairly flat pic, it is a scan from a print on a warm base paper, developed using a cold-tone developer then given a light thiocarbamide toning to the mid-highlights to get a yellow highs and blue lows split.

The second print is on a warm based paper (but less warm than 1st) using a cold tone dev then a selemium tone to the lower tonal range. giving a selenium shadows and cold high split.  If that is roughly what you see, then it's working ok.

thanks for the excellent responses to all.  very helpful stuff.

[tinm@n]

Sorry Leon excuse my ignorance.  It just scares me that, after all the effort of creating an analogue print and scanning it in, I might have to do a further load of complicated photoshoppery on top to make it look good on a range of monitors.  I guess if it is for displaying your best work it may be worth it.

The bark on the tree ?  .. what tree ? ;-)

[david b]

The thing about putting photos up on the web is that - even if you spend time getting everything to look perfect at your end and embed a profile - once it's been uploaded it's going to be viewed at all sorts of resolutions, on all sorts of monitors, and the vast majority of those will have never been calibrated.

It's fairly depressing looking at your own work blown out, weirdly colour skewed, or totally blocked up on someone else's system.  Best not to ponder on it too much really!

[gregor]

1st - just a photoshop tip. Depending on the version you should me able to simulte both a windows & a mac gamma (I think this gamma switching goes back as far as CS  or CS2 - can't recall).  Away from my computer now, I beleive it's in the 'view' menu. [edit: now back at my computer it's on the "View > proof setup" menu.

Trying to get images to look right across monitor brands, operating systems and browsers is a game of compromises. It's nearly impossible to strike a middle ground between them all. So the 1st thing I do is calibrate the monitor regularly with a Pantone spyder, then when editing a scan, flip photoshop into the windows gamma mode and go just a very small tad on the darker side in the mid tones as they will be lighter on a mac or safari for windows. Firefox or other mozilla based browsers are awful, especially for color.

Since you're on a PC your already in the wndows gamma by default, so flip it back and forth betwen mac & windows gammas until you find the middle point - and then bear in mind 95% of the people looking at your images have uncalibrated monitors - and that can vary in so many ways from poor backlighting (resulting inn dull tones) or way to bright, losing depth.

Sometimes I think a test that pulls a good inkjet print on an epspon or other higher end printer is the way to decide....

For awhile I was adjusting scans on a macbook with a high gloss screen - wow, did they look different when I saw them on a matte screen!

There's just so many, many variables to consider if you're adjusting for screen based viewing - most of which, from the viewer's perspective, you have no control over.