Screen paranoia

Hi all,

I took this in Bruges a few weeks ago..




and processed it on my home machine, the monitor of which has been calibrated with WyzyWig. I liked it enough to put up as the desktop theme on my work machine.. and it's a bit washed out. Could someone with a calibrated monitor just let me know if it looks okay please. I did say paranoia..

Cheers

Liam

Liam,
Yes, it's a bit washed out
You've clipped the blue channel, especially in the sky region (check out with an eyedropper on the sky and the blue is at 255 or 254).

One thing with doing stuff at home is to watch the ambient light, especially if you're using a laptop. If the ambient light is too high, and you opt for D65 in WiziWYG, you may find the LCD can't deliver the goods - and you end up getting "bleurgh" images.

Keep the ambient light really low (not far off dark), and use D50. You'll probably get a better match.

BTW, this applies to Spyders as well as WiziWYG.

In the end you begin to realise why some monitors are £130, and others are £3500, even though the specs may appear close It's down to contrast, white point, and colour gamut (ie what the display can actually reproduce).

Believe me, colour management will get you pulling your hair out and banging your head against the wall... sooner or later

Matt

Liam,

I have a monitor calibrated recently with a Spyder 2. Your pic looks a little washed out, lacking a little in contrast.

I have just run your pic through photshop cs2 and auto levels makes no significant improvement. What did improve the image for me was picking different black, grey, and white points.

The points I picked:

Black - Right foreground, where the water meets the stonework
Grey - Part of the lighter roof colouring
White - Main building, between 3rd and 4th window from right, low down close to the rooftop below, between the 2nd row of small panes. That is the nearest I can find to white.

Picking these points produces a more 'vivid' image for me.

Hi,

and thanks for checking this out. So it wasn't paranoia after all, or to quote..

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't necessarily mean that no one is out to get you!"

Matt,

I think the first thing to do is to create a new profile, using your tips. I can't remember exactly what the settings were now. I'm using a 17" HP Ultra VGA 1280 CRT monitor, circa 1995.

Peter,

I've set the black and white points via the histogram, so it must be the midtones that I've got wrong. These I've adjusted via the gamma correction on the histogram, but doing this visually, on what I thought at the time was a calibrated monitor.. has exacerbated the problem so as I mentioned above, the first thing to do is to create a new profile.. properly, and go from there.

I'll try a new profile and post up the results for a comparison a little later.
I know I can compare it to the above image, as an approximation anyway, but if one or both of you could then double check for me, I'd be grateful.


Cheers

Liam

But what if your setup is in the livingroom, other then working in the middle of the night I see no way of reducing the ambient light without upsetting my girlfriend

Besides that, I did make a new wiziwyg profile using D50 instead of D65 and I do see an improvement. I get the feeling that the images from the DS look better out of the camera then with the D65 white point.
I'll do some playing with it and send some pictures to a printing shop to compare with the same images previously edited with a D65 whitepoint.

I'm not doing too well here. This looks good on my monitor now, but everything else looks washed out. This could be just that I'm not used to it.

The reds tend to look more orange.. ish.

I've tried to match up by eye, the red PENTAX on the box from my DL, and it looks like this..




roughly.

HTML f60124

RGB 246,1,36

Is that close??

Cheers

Liam

Much better. Still just a fraction light on my monitor.

G

I think this could take a while to get right. You have a shaded area in the right foreground caused by the trees. The detail that you had in that area in the first shot is now all but disappeared into the black. For instance, there is a plant growing in the wall in that area which you can hardly see now. That said, the pic is now more 'pleasing' to the eye overall.

Hi,




sorry if this is getting tedious, but this is my next attempt. I think it may be that the monitor is getting on a bit. Someone at work is getting rid of a 17" CRT (HP), that is a lot newer, and for free, so if I can get that I may stand a chance. The main problem with wiziwig and this monitor is the brightness and contrast settings (at the beginning of the wizard); I haven't seen any black squares inside the bigger black squares??? and I can quite clearly see the grey squares inside the white, throughout the full extent of the contrast range on this monitor???

Hopefully this is getting closer though.

Cheers for indulging me

Cheers

Liam

This last one looks about spot-on to me. The colours are much more natural looking. Bright, but not 'in yer face' like version 2.

I'm using a video7 17" flat panel and I had the opposite issue with Wiziwyg in that I couldn't see the grey squares within the white ones. I gave up in the end and bought a Spyder 2 to calibrate it.

Hi,

that's that sorted then.. cheers for the help.

Now all I have to do is to adjust all the images so that look correct with the new settings. The only real change (except for the birthday party last weekend, which I'll redo from scratch) is the gamma correction. Is there someway of doing that by the same amount over a whole folder of images? I've got Irfan View, and I beleive that does batches, but I'll have to have a read up first.

Once done, I can always hand check and do final adjustments where necessary.

Cheers

Liam

I like Irfan View for batches..

I've just corrected 90 odd images in around a minute. (We can forget the hour of learning I did before that, along with the occasional screw up.. restoring all the images from the Recycle Bin for instance. )

I found this while looking for an Irfan View FAQ. It's all the help file, laid out in alphabetical order.

http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~avalos/stuff/download/irfanview/alphidx1.html
For batch conversions go to err.. yeah, well, I'm sure you'll find it.

As my conversions were basically to reset entire folders processed on a badly calibrated monitor, and so should all need the same changes throughout, I took an image, corrected it, remembered the settings, and then just put the same settings into the batch conversion window, et voilà job done.

I'll be doing this on lots of folders now. Handy hint, create a new folder to export the converted images to, so you don't lose the originals.

Cheers

Liam