I know this isn't a new issue, but I needed a little moan :P
I recently calibrated my own laptop screen, but my images always look so different when they're uploaded and viewed on my phone or work PC.
I presume I'm best off trusting the screen which (I believe) should be correctly calibrated?
The image I uploaded today on my own screen looks bright white, but on my phone it's a bit yellow, and on my work PC, a bit grey or at least, darker contrast. Could anyone share some insight as to whether or not my laptop has lulled me into a false sense of security? Yellow, grey or not?
I've thought about this a few times and then decided ignorance is bliss. I haven't calibrated my laptop screen as I don't have a calibration thingie but I just put my photos out there and hope they look decent on other people's screens too. I'd stress myself out way too much if I worried about everyone's screens because who knows what settings people have.
I know you can't compare laptops / pc with phones though. The screens are completely different and photos will always look brighter and more vivid on the phone screen. Hence mostly every mobile photo you upload looking less impressive on your laptop or PC.
The photo you posted looks mostly white to me, maybe a little cream? Like it's not as white as the background, but it's not yellow by any means. So it's white, but not STARK white.
Not yellow to me at all. There appears to be a curve at the top that has a greenish hue to it to me? Other than that, it is white. I haven't calibrated my screen as I don't have a thingy either lol.
@breigh True enough. I presume an image is always not going to look "right" somewhere. *fist shake* At least if this looks a bit creamy then it's not a million miles away from where it's meant to be :D
@ozziehoffy Ahhh yeah yeah, I can see that at work, I didn't spot it at home this morning. I think that might actually just be a mucky lens haha tut tut!
I browse a lot on my phone, at work, when people are on the computer or when i dont want my wife to know im on this site again, like now! And every shot looks completely different on here to the point that if i see something i like i remember to check back when on the computer. If anyone could explain why thatd be nice.
Didnt even know you could calibrate a computer screen. Do you have to have a fancy computer?
Also what is the best way to ensure prints are how you have seen them on your computer.
@gwhit123 Screen calibration is a whole subject in itself. There are various gadgets to do it. Mostly ot is done to ensure that when you print something it looks the same as the screen. I was looking at buying the spyder software but haven't managed to justify it to myself yet. :-)
I just checked on my phone and it's definitely more creamy / yellowish than on my laptop... but like I said, they are a completely different type of screen.
I know, I'm very technical with my "calibration thingy" talk, I hope you can all keep up hahaha
One problem that I used to have was the whole color management issue with Chrome. It used to drive me crazy when I'd edit a photo, upload it and have it completely washed out! It made me use the resource hog, Firefox, for ages... but they seemed to have fixed it, thank goodness!
Ive calibrated my laptop and have the same problem ~ my recent Lyme Regis wall shot http://365project.org/alisonp/year-2-2013-14/2013-04-02 the background is really pale on the laptop [pale blueish] yet on my phone it is almost bright lilac ... I have calibrated as I want to print out some photos using an online lab, but not sure what i am going to get ...
Your shot here on my laptop has a creamy tone to it.
@gwhit123 no I think it helps though. If you use sRGB as most of us do for the web it is usually converted by professional printers to Adobe RGB to be printed. It's a very complex subject. :(
@gwhit123 I was having problems with prints that I sent for and I got a calibration print from Photobox that allowed me to match the print to a supplied jpeg. Rough and ready, but better than nothing.
@dandolo i wish it wasnt so complicated. I know its a way off yet but i am aiming to get a book made at the end of first year, what do i need to do to make it look right? Or is that an impossible question?
@dandolo It really is complex. When I was in a photo club they used to talk about it and the few times I tried to get into it and learn about it so I could make sure I had everything set up right, I got really overwhelmed and said "oh screw it!" aha
Actually, I have an issue with contrast between my work monitor, home notebook and phone. LED panels tend to be brighter but lack contrast so I have learnt to tone it down a little before uploading.
I have learned to put my laptop screen on a certain angle to match my desktop screen and printouts that I have got. Not an exact science but it works for me :)
@gwhit123 Not at all hijacked. Interesting actually.
I'm afraid I married a geek who does all this computer lark for me :p
He did, however buy me a decent A3 printer for my birthday last year (which actually STILL needs calibrating properly) as I find when I print the colours differ to screen, so yes, I imagine this is an impossible question.
Lots of folk say that when they've had books printed, they look different to how they do on screen.
@breigh That's an interesting thought about browsers..not a theory I've tested before. Don't think I could cope with Chrome failing me. I'm an avid Chrome fan haha.
I hear you!! Your shot on my screen looks like a pale yellow..
Often when I am working on a shot on my desktop, it looks great, then looks utter rubbish on another screen.. It frustrates the hell out of me lol
@amyamoeba Yeah I worried i would pay lots of money for a decent book and be disappointed by the results. I have moved to computer and the background looks almost pure white on here
Same as Al Perry, light cream back ground on my monitor, I had this discussion with a master printer and there is no real answer to this point in question. When the monitors etc are made they set them at a gamma rating of 2.2 and over time and adjustments that rating changes. If you print out your photo it will probably look different as well. Mark who is a Mater printer charges $120 to calibrate monitors in your home and for good reason he can charge that. Unless you an calibrate all your gizmos to the same rating it is case of live with it or not.
Cream, definitely. This sort of thing is always going to happen given the great variation of screens out there with the range of different calibrations and the way people access the internet. Save your image with an SRGB profile (if you can) and it will do its best to retain your settings in most browsers. Calibrating your own monitor is helpful to you but if other people haven't done theirs - or can't - there's not much to be done.
On my screen (just calibrated) it's definitely a cream background.
@amyamoeba As a side note for printing, remember you should also be incorporating the ICC profile of the paper used. Each paper has different characteristics and will print the colour differently (matte, glossy etc). So, your printer can be calibrated fine, but you need to take into consideration the paper you are printing on and how that affects colour. http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/profiles.htm
I was always told that laptops should not be edited on and could not be calibrated in a true sense. However, I have no idea if this is correct or not and went and bought a screen and calibration tool. That being said I have heard of many people editing on laptops and happy, so I have no idea. In this photo on my screen it shows a creamy feel. Which I think is lovely.
I hear you Amy. I get frustrated with my computers, too. My pictures look great on my desktop computer but they look darker on my laptop.
Your picture looks creamy off white on my desktop one. I thinks it looks beautiful.
Not sure if this was posted already but an instructor told me re: color shift when posting to the web, "you’ll want to make sure your images are formatted in RGB before saving"
Also in general, your phone, work & home monitors will all be different, especially with white and blacks. Age of a monitor can also contribute as well as the general settings of the monitor (contrast, brightness, etc). I think if you home monitor is properly calibrated then it's right. You could also validate your white by looking at the histogram. Good luck!
@brianl sRGB, not RGB (almost all images are in RGB, the important issue is the colour space which is called sRGB).
You should either convert to sRGB before saving, or use the Save to Web function which will do the conversion as part of the save process (note that there is a small error on your link, you should enable the 'embed colour profile' checkbox for 100% compatibility, although most web browsers these days don't care about that bit).
However, as @amyamoeba isn't complaining that her images look different on her laptop before and after uploading (just that they look different on other devices), I suspect this isn't the problem in this case, although it's certainly a common problem on here (and other photography sites).
I suspect the problem here is simply the quality of the display -- laptop displays are rarely particularly good at colour reproduction or even brightness. Calibration will get the display as good as it can be (assuming you use a good calibrator), but if the display fundamentally can't display certain colours, then there's nothing a calibrator can do about that.
Laptop displays also commonly have very uneven brightness when viewed at different angles -- if you angle the screen back and forth you will see the blacks and whites alter in brightness slightly, even on expensive laptops. (This also happens on desktop displays, but typically to a much lesser degree). This means that unless you are viewing the screen directly head-on, the calibration will be invalid anyway. This actually happens to such a degree that there is typically a small but measurable difference between how brightness appears at the top of the screen to the bottom, because the angle between your eye and the top of the screen is different to the angle between your eye and the bottom of the screen.
In the case of this image, there is a very clear colour shift in the data towards yellow in the intended 'white' areas of the image. If we load the image into Photoshop and use the colour picker on the background, then we get a figure of (for a random point), 252, 253, 242. (Those figures are the red, green and blue values of the 'white' pixel, out of a maximum of 255).
We can see that the red and green values are nearly equal and maxed out, but the blue value is not. This is why the background should appear faintly cream/yellow to anyone with a well-calibrated display -- we have more red and green than we do blue (and those who remember the principals of additive colour will remember that red and green together make yellow).
So in this case, we can be fairly confident that how @amyamoeba's display is showing the colour is not as the colour should be displayed. The only outstanding question is how much of the fault of this is due to the calibrator, and how much is due to the laptop screen, and that's very difficult to answer without using the calibrator to calibrate other screens and see whether they have a similar issue.
Edit: One more thing to remember is that a calibration only applies to a given screen brightness. Many laptops automatically adjust the screen brightness depending on ambient light -- if you want a meaningful calibration, you need to disable that function, and always have the screen at the same brightness as when it was calibrated.
An interesting test might be to view this page on the screen in question:
And see at what number you stop being able to see the 'checkerbox' pattern. (On a well-calibrated dsiplay you should be able to see the checkerbox pattern under all of the numbers). If you can't, that would indicate either a bad calibration, a change in screen brightness, or the screen being at a bad angle.
on the monitor at work, its creamy (except the center of the image, which is bright white), the closer you get to the edges, the more yellowish the cream becomes. But on this monitor, when I click the link @abirkill provided, I can only make out the first 4 checkerboards, and the 4th I can barely detect, so this monitor is not giving a true display of the color. On my laptop, your picture appears to be white/cream flowers on white background (with the bottom having a tinge of grey. When I used the link from Alexis with my laptop, I can view all but the last 2 checkerboards easily, and I can just barely make out the last 2, so I think that means my laptop is calibrated more properly and displaying white more correctly.
@jsw0109 That's pretty much right, although it's a bit more complicated than that. A calibrator does two things, it makes sure you can view a full range of tones (that the blacks and whites aren't 'crushed'), and that the colours you see are accurate (not shifted).
Unfortunately the website I linked to (and any website) can only help you determine if you can see a full range of tones -- it can't tell how accurate your colours are. To do this, you need to get a colour chart printout from a known calibrated system, and compare a given colour on the printout to how it looks on your screen.
We know (from the RGB values) that @amyamoeba's photograph does have a yellow tint to the background, so on a correctly calibrated display it should show as such. There are two likely possibilities as to why this would show as white for her:
1. Her screen is showing colours correctly, but is 'overexposing' the image. In this case, any RGB values above a certain point will just show up as pure white, regardless of the actual tint, because the screen is 'crushing' the whites. The website will show that this crushing is taking place, and this should be fixable -- any functional calibrator should be able to get a display to show a full range of tones.
2. Her screen is showing tones correctly, but it is shifting the colours to be bluer than they should be. In this case, she will be able to see all or almost all of the checkerboards on the website, but everything she views will have a blueish tint to it (which she is then 'correcting' when post-processing to make the photograph look neutral to her, and yellow to others). This may or may not be fixable, and could be a calibrator problem or a screen problem.
I suspect the problem is the latter, because as you saw, Jeff, you have access to a screen which is not showing a full range of tones (your work monitor) and yet you can still see the photo is yellow at the edges (it should, ideally, look yellow even in the centre of the background, because we have less blue across the entire background, but your monitor is crushing the centre of the background to appear solid white). Equally, on your laptop, you can see a full range of tones (pretty much), but the image is appearing neutral, suggesting that display has a blue shift which is neutralising the yellow tint, probably in a similar way to Amy's laptop.
All of the tests on the website I linked to, but particularly the black level, white saturation and gamma calibration tests, are extremely useful to give you an idea of how well the display you are using is behaving (and those three should all pass with flying colours on a good display that has been calibrated), but they don't (and can't) tell the entire story. But if any of those three tests do not look good on a calibrated display, then either the display or the calibration are poor.
@abirkill This is awesome, thank you so much for your fab input, I'm just home from work at 9pm (boo!) But shall be checking out my laptop as soon as its fired up :D
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I know you can't compare laptops / pc with phones though. The screens are completely different and photos will always look brighter and more vivid on the phone screen. Hence mostly every mobile photo you upload looking less impressive on your laptop or PC.
The photo you posted looks mostly white to me, maybe a little cream? Like it's not as white as the background, but it's not yellow by any means. So it's white, but not STARK white.
Didnt even know you could calibrate a computer screen. Do you have to have a fancy computer?
Also what is the best way to ensure prints are how you have seen them on your computer.
I know, I'm very technical with my "calibration thingy" talk, I hope you can all keep up hahaha
One problem that I used to have was the whole color management issue with Chrome. It used to drive me crazy when I'd edit a photo, upload it and have it completely washed out! It made me use the resource hog, Firefox, for ages... but they seemed to have fixed it, thank goodness!
Your shot here on my laptop has a creamy tone to it.
Sorry for hijacking this thread amy :-()
Actually, I have an issue with contrast between my work monitor, home notebook and phone. LED panels tend to be brighter but lack contrast so I have learnt to tone it down a little before uploading.
I'm afraid I married a geek who does all this computer lark for me :p
He did, however buy me a decent A3 printer for my birthday last year (which actually STILL needs calibrating properly) as I find when I print the colours differ to screen, so yes, I imagine this is an impossible question.
Lots of folk say that when they've had books printed, they look different to how they do on screen.
@breigh That's an interesting thought about browsers..not a theory I've tested before. Don't think I could cope with Chrome failing me. I'm an avid Chrome fan haha.
Often when I am working on a shot on my desktop, it looks great, then looks utter rubbish on another screen.. It frustrates the hell out of me lol
@amyamoeba As a side note for printing, remember you should also be incorporating the ICC profile of the paper used. Each paper has different characteristics and will print the colour differently (matte, glossy etc). So, your printer can be calibrated fine, but you need to take into consideration the paper you are printing on and how that affects colour.
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/profiles.htm
Your picture looks creamy off white on my desktop one. I thinks it looks beautiful.
Here's a really long read http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/comprehensive-guide-saving-images-for-web/
Also in general, your phone, work & home monitors will all be different, especially with white and blacks. Age of a monitor can also contribute as well as the general settings of the monitor (contrast, brightness, etc). I think if you home monitor is properly calibrated then it's right. You could also validate your white by looking at the histogram. Good luck!
You should either convert to sRGB before saving, or use the Save to Web function which will do the conversion as part of the save process (note that there is a small error on your link, you should enable the 'embed colour profile' checkbox for 100% compatibility, although most web browsers these days don't care about that bit).
However, as @amyamoeba isn't complaining that her images look different on her laptop before and after uploading (just that they look different on other devices), I suspect this isn't the problem in this case, although it's certainly a common problem on here (and other photography sites).
I suspect the problem here is simply the quality of the display -- laptop displays are rarely particularly good at colour reproduction or even brightness. Calibration will get the display as good as it can be (assuming you use a good calibrator), but if the display fundamentally can't display certain colours, then there's nothing a calibrator can do about that.
Laptop displays also commonly have very uneven brightness when viewed at different angles -- if you angle the screen back and forth you will see the blacks and whites alter in brightness slightly, even on expensive laptops. (This also happens on desktop displays, but typically to a much lesser degree). This means that unless you are viewing the screen directly head-on, the calibration will be invalid anyway. This actually happens to such a degree that there is typically a small but measurable difference between how brightness appears at the top of the screen to the bottom, because the angle between your eye and the top of the screen is different to the angle between your eye and the bottom of the screen.
In the case of this image, there is a very clear colour shift in the data towards yellow in the intended 'white' areas of the image. If we load the image into Photoshop and use the colour picker on the background, then we get a figure of (for a random point), 252, 253, 242. (Those figures are the red, green and blue values of the 'white' pixel, out of a maximum of 255).
We can see that the red and green values are nearly equal and maxed out, but the blue value is not. This is why the background should appear faintly cream/yellow to anyone with a well-calibrated display -- we have more red and green than we do blue (and those who remember the principals of additive colour will remember that red and green together make yellow).
So in this case, we can be fairly confident that how @amyamoeba's display is showing the colour is not as the colour should be displayed. The only outstanding question is how much of the fault of this is due to the calibrator, and how much is due to the laptop screen, and that's very difficult to answer without using the calibrator to calibrate other screens and see whether they have a similar issue.
Edit: One more thing to remember is that a calibration only applies to a given screen brightness. Many laptops automatically adjust the screen brightness depending on ambient light -- if you want a meaningful calibration, you need to disable that function, and always have the screen at the same brightness as when it was calibrated.
An interesting test might be to view this page on the screen in question:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/white.php
And see at what number you stop being able to see the 'checkerbox' pattern. (On a well-calibrated dsiplay you should be able to see the checkerbox pattern under all of the numbers). If you can't, that would indicate either a bad calibration, a change in screen brightness, or the screen being at a bad angle.
Unfortunately the website I linked to (and any website) can only help you determine if you can see a full range of tones -- it can't tell how accurate your colours are. To do this, you need to get a colour chart printout from a known calibrated system, and compare a given colour on the printout to how it looks on your screen.
We know (from the RGB values) that @amyamoeba's photograph does have a yellow tint to the background, so on a correctly calibrated display it should show as such. There are two likely possibilities as to why this would show as white for her:
1. Her screen is showing colours correctly, but is 'overexposing' the image. In this case, any RGB values above a certain point will just show up as pure white, regardless of the actual tint, because the screen is 'crushing' the whites. The website will show that this crushing is taking place, and this should be fixable -- any functional calibrator should be able to get a display to show a full range of tones.
2. Her screen is showing tones correctly, but it is shifting the colours to be bluer than they should be. In this case, she will be able to see all or almost all of the checkerboards on the website, but everything she views will have a blueish tint to it (which she is then 'correcting' when post-processing to make the photograph look neutral to her, and yellow to others). This may or may not be fixable, and could be a calibrator problem or a screen problem.
I suspect the problem is the latter, because as you saw, Jeff, you have access to a screen which is not showing a full range of tones (your work monitor) and yet you can still see the photo is yellow at the edges (it should, ideally, look yellow even in the centre of the background, because we have less blue across the entire background, but your monitor is crushing the centre of the background to appear solid white). Equally, on your laptop, you can see a full range of tones (pretty much), but the image is appearing neutral, suggesting that display has a blue shift which is neutralising the yellow tint, probably in a similar way to Amy's laptop.
All of the tests on the website I linked to, but particularly the black level, white saturation and gamma calibration tests, are extremely useful to give you an idea of how well the display you are using is behaving (and those three should all pass with flying colours on a good display that has been calibrated), but they don't (and can't) tell the entire story. But if any of those three tests do not look good on a calibrated display, then either the display or the calibration are poor.