Had a question the other day about the quality of my pics.
“It looks awesome on your screen but looks a bit off on mine”
There are a number of factors at play here:
*everyone sees colours (or to be precise, light) differently
*different monitors
*different media (monitors vs print)
*different ambient lighting
*and so on
Rather than make it a science lesson, here are the basics:
*it is extremely difficult to get all output the same
*the best you can do is to get very very close to what the artist/photographer had in mind
The cheap way, they will improve any uncalibrated monitor.
Before you start make sure you:
*have your monitor on for a few minutes to allow for it to settle down
*have consistent, comfortably dark lighting in your room (ambient lighting)
*have your eyes looking at the monitor, in that room for a few minutes. Your eyes need to adjust too.
Use a monitor calibration chart, just google it and you’ll find a few:
http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
(Simple calibration chart)
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test
(A few more tests)
The not so cheap way:
http://www.datacolor.com
(Spyder 3-hardware calibration tool)
Read the instructions before using this
The pimped way:
Get a pro calibrated monitor and a bank loan.
Naturally, there is way more to this than just calibration. Maybe in the next blog…
