I’ve been into photography for years and this is an issue that keeps coming up and discouraging me. If someone could help me resolve this, I’d be eternally grateful
Basically, I understand the concept of calibrating monitors but every time I actually calibrate mine it only makes my monitor look unusably awful and kind of ruins my prints that already looked good when posting online.
This all started ten years agon (and again, this pattern has repeated every 1 to 2 years for the past ten years)….
Ten years ago, I would take a RAW photo on my camera and transfer it to my macbook pro (yes, I know you shouldn’t edit and print from a laptop, but it’s all I had at the time). The RAW, undedited image from the camera to Lightroom looked identical. I edit the photo, post it online and it looks good from my iphone, facebook, other peoples phones and other computers. I even printed a couple photos and they looked pretty good. I am now looking at a photo that I edited at that time from my uncalibrated MBP and it looks very close to how it looks on my iphone, which is the same LR from 10 years ago.
At the time, I figured it was important to calibrate my monitor but when I did that it just destroyed the screen on the macbook. It didn’t even look close to natural and turned everything muddy brown. Now, I understand maybe I was just used to seeing the incorrect, uncalibrated version but I have an image that proves the uncalibrated screen printed just find and looked great on a screen. However, the calibrated screen looked too awful to continue using so I deleted the profile and continued editing the way I did.
Again, over the next ten years I’ve repeated this process over and over. The calibrated screen just looks too bad to deal with and it makes my images that I worked so hard on, and look good on other screens, look terrible.
So tonight I am now using a PC and a BenQ gaming monitor that is 100% SRGB accurate, I decided to calibrate again because I really really want to get into printing my images but the same thing happened. All my images, that look great on my iphone and match my uncalibrated screen to about 90% now look awful.
What am I doing wrong? I do like to game on this same screen but I’ve always just decreased the screens default color saturation and contrast to match how the images look on my iphone, which matches Lightroom pretty closely.
Also, the uncalibrated screen I am currently using looks identical to how the raw images look in camera but the calibrated screen looks nowhere near close.
I’m once again discouraged and giving up on trying to print but I’d love to figure out what I’m doing wrong.
It seems that I have to choose between editing and viewing my images on an uncalibrated screen and my images will look better on a screen or calibrate my screen and maybe they print more accurate but they will not look the same when posted online.
If there is someone out there who wants to make some money, PM and I will pay you 50$ for your time if you can help me figure out this problem.
What tools do you use for calibration?
Thank you so much!!
I am using a Spyder pro c
Gamma 2.2
6500k
120 bright
I'm calibrating monitors for a similar period probably. And I also started with Spyder. These display calibrators age quite fast in theory - you should replace them every 2-3 years. I just started using spectrophotometers instead - but I'm lucky to have them at work. They are much more expensive to buy and have their own shortcommings. As you have similar experience from the beginning - probably this isn't the issue. Also older Spyders don't work with wide gamut monitors - not sure if you monitors have wide gamut. Also monitors with TN panels don't calibrate too well - although I tried some and there was an improvement.
Overall after longer use of uncalibrated monitor calibration always looks dull and sometimes have some tint - it's just our brain needs to adjust. But the result speaks for itself. I work in print and have access to colour proofing equipment - calibrated screen looks really close to calibrated print. But! It mostly differs from phones, other screens. Also not all printers have colour accurate equipment. By doing calibration you are reducing deviations from your side - but there are a lot of weak links left in the chain. So depending on your needs visual matching to other screens or print (if you can't access colour accurate printing service) might work better than calibration. Although I prefer to have my screen as the starting point which I can more or less rely to be accurate.
Not sure if all this novel is usefull at all :) Just wanted to share my experience.