If I set the brightness of my monitor to where I like it for text and web pages, then it seems photos are too dark most of the time. Every time I prepare a photo for web display, I make it lighter than most photos on the Net, so that it appears OK on my monitor. I am thinking it may be that I am out of sync here and it is too bright for everybody else. Is there any standard so that I may know what is a reasonable brightness for pictures? I guess someone must have developed some images which would be used to calibrate monitors? If a picture looks dark, how do I know if I need to lighten the picture or to turn up the brightness level of the monitor?
Google, “computer monitor test patterns”. Hit #1.
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/monitorsbig/test/_open.htm
If you’re not desktop publishing where monitor color matching is critical and specific tools exist for that purpose, the best test is simply to scan a picture (assuming your scanner makes accurate color scans) with known real world characteristics and with the picture in hand make adjustments to your monitor to best correspond with the reality of the picture.
Beyond onboard monitor brightness, contrast and color temperature controls many of the better video cards and chipsets come with software applets for color and gamma adjustment tools that will affect color rendition globally and give much finer control over desired color while still maintaining luminosity parameters. Also some monitors tend to lose good contrast and brightness balance as they age. If you don’t have one you might want to treat youself to a nice Trinitron or similar high quality monitor. You can see the differece.
If you have Adobe Photoshop, you should have a Control Panel called “Gamma” that will let you make a very wide variety of adjustments to your monitors.
DDG, thanks for the link. I have been playing around with those adjustments and will continue to refine in the coming days. The Color Scale Test was quite useful to determine scale as the darker part was too dark.
Astro, I am not really so much concerned with color as with brightness and contrast. I seem to adjust my brain pretty well to any color balance unless it is totally off. But almost every photo seems too dark. Every photo I take with my digital camera, I have to lighten. The scanner has an “auto” setting and I also have to lighten after that. Many from the Net too. So it makes me think I need to increase the luminosity of the monitor but then it seems too bright for text and other graphics…
The LCD of the laptop really cannot compare with a CRT display.
I guess the question can be simplified as “How do we know we all have our monitors to the same brightness and therefore are seeing the same thing?”
The simple real world answer is that you don’t and you can’t. Perceived brightness, contrast and host of other display variables from unit to unit are dependent on complex hardware and software chains. There are color matching technologies for higher end desktop publishing systems but for the morass that is the web there is no cost effective way (yet) to calibrate and synchronize accurate brightness contrast etc levels between disparate systems.