(no subject)

[greatbear]

I have a question, directed at those on my list who are graphics professionals or photographers. Do you use a monitor color calibrator, or adjust by eye? If you use a calibrator, what kind do you use? While on my last trip, I had my laptop with me. When I offloaded my pictures to it, I thought I had ruined a large number of them playing with exposure settings. When I got home to my desktop system things looked much better. I still have yet to tweak this new display I got the other day, but it looks good on the old profile.

I am looking for something to help give consistency to the various systems and displays I use. I am also wondering how to best match the screen colors with my printed output. So, I figure I'd turn this into a 'Dear Lazywebs' post and see what you folks have for suggestions. You can even tell me to pound sand if you want.

TIA!

Comments

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I am a n00b as well, and this is something I've been trying to sort out on my own for a while for similar reasons to yours. Some applications like PS use colorcolour profiles to not only maintain similar levels among applications and hardware, but to give an accurate screen representation as well (this is where the calibration comes in). This awareness does not always span different applications, this is why your application shows changes in levels. I am not familiar with Graphic Converter, so I am useless for specific help. I used to be in a similar position, as I would use an old program called LView Pro for quick-and-dirty graphic editing mostly for web use. It saved compact files, and the program was a cinch to use for typical simple editing. Thing is, later on, I found out that LView fundamentally changed the levels of resulting files when opened up in Photoshop or other graphics programs at the time. In shrinking the files, LView would strip embedded info that various programs used to keep levels consistent, and printing some of the resulting files often made for dark, flat prints. This was a good 8 years ago. Things are much more interoperable, but once you look beyond the simple photo editing for casual consumer use, it gets very complicated. I want to move a bit beyond what I am doing now, and I'm finding out it's a jungle out there.

Not sure what you can do to correct the issues you are having with your files, I would experiment using different color space settings to see which one maintains the best levels between apps.