Monitor contrast

[Aequitas]

http://jwolford.smugmug.com/photos/230256370-L-1.jpg



I recently posted this in the latest LPS contest and now am viewing it from my computer at work and find the blacks to be substantially darker than at my home computer.

How dark is this on your screen, particularly the sky at the top of the image. On my home monitor it is pretty clearly distinguishable from the tree line, but on this computer it is not.

How do you typically calibrate your monitor for preparing images for online viewing? I find that my current calibration produces accurate prints, but am concerned that many people may not be seeing my images the way I intend when viewed online. Particularly with high contrast images where it is very easy to lose detail in the darks. Do you settle for a happy medium? Is there any source of data for what the average monitor calibration is so I can aim for making my online images look good when viewed on the "average" monitor?

Thanks
Justin

[Mr. 2H2O]

Justin,
I have two settings on my monitor - one I use to process for printing, and another I use to process for web display. The web display setting has less contrast than the one I use for printing - the blacks are lighter for web display.

On your picture on my LCD, the sky is clearly distinguished from the tree line.

- Mike

[pathfinder]

The sad truth is that if you process your images to look their best, and they have tones across the entire gamut from deep black to true white, that on many monitors out there on the web, the image will look bad because they cannot see the tonal separations in the shadows or the highlights on their poorer quality or non- calibrated monitors.

Some fine art websites address this issue by displaying a full tone grey scale and warn folks that if they cannot see the entire set of steps, that they images may not look correct to them.

If you read any of the camera reviews at dpreview.com they do this routinely, as seen here (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/FujifilmS8000fd/) near the bottom of the page.

There is no real easy answer to this issue, and I believe most artists just accept it, and process their images to look as good as the can on a well calibrated image and move on.

The only other option is to compromise your image so that it will look a little better to those folks with poorer monitors. Of course, that means that the folks who understand, and took the time and expense to calibrate their monitors, are receiving a lesser version of your image. This is probably a bad thing because I believe folks with calibrated monitors are more likely to be interested in images in general, and more likely to be customers as well. I could be wrong about the last statement of course.

My monitor at work is some name I have never heard of LCD - very easy to read text and web pages, but compresse 2 or 3 grey steps at each end of the scale compared to my calibrated Cinema Display I use at home. I try to be very careful examining any images at work, the display is just to limited in displaying a full range of tones. But lots of folks never seen a full range monitor and don't know what we are talking about.

The sky is clearly separate from the dark almost black background. The pixels read in the 80s - neutral gray would be 128 for example. Definitely lower quarter tones.