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.
As you have pointed out, every device has a different screen and images will look different from one to another. Mobile devices and PCs are setup to show highly saturated, high contrast images. As someone else said, “punchy” and people have gotten conditioned to want this look on their screens.
If you are only using your photography on screens, I don’t think you should bother with calibration. This is because you’re editing an image on a calibrated monitor and displaying it on a variety of other screens that are uncalibrated. It won’t look right.
However, if you are going to print your photos, calibration is critical. Printed photos do not look like the punchy screens. In this case you are calibrating your monitor to show you what the image will look like in print. Even then, there are usually tweaks you need to do to get the screen to match the final print, but starting with a calibrated monitor gets you 90% there.
Maybe it makes sense to do the first round of edits on the uncalibrated profile to make sure it looks good on a screen and then only calibrate when I go to print? I guess Virtual copies make this easy to do