Looking for help re screen calibration

Hi all,

As per the title. I do all my processing on my mid 2007 iMac with the 20" screen. Right away I know the screen was less than, say, the 24" of its time, and much less than the current crop. Thats the leadin.

What I am finding, and have always found, is that when I process on the Mac, and get the photo looking as good as I think I can, and then upload somewhere, the photo that looked fine on the mac now looks pretty awful on the same screen. The colours are flat, and overall the shots are darker than they originally appeared, thus leading me to think there is something desperately wrong with my calibration... except... why would they appear horrid on screen via browser, when they looked fine prior to upload.

These are all things I don't understand, at all. I dont have access to any external calibration tools, only what comes with OSX. I'd be *really* grateful if someone could give me some pointers about calibrating correctly, and also, to explain why the differences appear even when viewing on the same screen.

Thanks in advance, screen Gurus
 
I'm no guru but four things occur to me. First, if it is the same screen you are using and the difference is only between viewing files from your hard drive and viewing files via a web browser then it's not you screen that is the problem. Second, all sites you upload to process your images some way for screen display. It could be that whatever way they are being processed is affecting the final view though I wouldn't have thought it would be so severe that you would notice such a difference. Are you getting the same result even when uploading the images at different sizes, resolutions and image quality settings and are you getting the same results using different upload sites? Third thing, not all browsers have colour management by default though if you are using a Mac I assume you are using Safari and that does. So, the final thing is to check if your images are sRGB or Adobe RGB. If the latter then they will display differently on monitors - flat colours are common on Adobe RGB files displayed on monitors.

There's a good article on all this here.

I hope this gets you started and hopefully someone with a bit more technical knowledge will weigh in here later.
 
Third thing, not all browsers have colour management by default though if you are using a Mac I assume you are using Safari and that does. So, the final thing is to check if your images are sRGB or Adobe RGB. If the latter then they will display differently on monitors - flat colours are common on Adobe RGB files displayed on monitors.

There's a good article on all this here.

I hope this gets you started and hopefully someone with a bit more technical knowledge will weigh in here later.

Thanks, olli. Yes, its all sizes which are affected. Your point about sRGB and adobeRGB is well taken, I rather think that is something I need to look at, because I havent, always. And I tend to use firefox rather than safari... but I'll look in other browsers as well.

Thanks so much for the link, too. Any and all information is useful.

[edit] Olli! That link is perfect. It gives exactly the information I need, I think. I'm not on the mac right now but tomorrow when I am back at it, I will be making some changes to the calibration *and* to how I end up saving photographs and their colour information. I thank you a bazillion times :)
 
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