I’ll have to study the subject of calibration (or default brightness of a monitor) soon because it’s causing me some problems. I am sending pictures to people and they are MUCH darker on their computer screens or cellphone then what I can see on my own monitors.
At home I use my ProArt 23.8" 1080p, at the job it’s an older 4:3 Lenovo and I also use an older HP probook laptop, I think G4, with a 6th generation intel processor, it’s not new but the screen is 1080p and pretty good looking.
I do my processing at home with the pro art and my pictures look pretty good on my 3 monitors, but on the monitors of other people it’s always WAY too dark.
I don’t even know where to start with this… understanding what is going on. I am not going to change my settings on my screens for sure… but at the same time I need to find a way for people to fully enjoy my images.
We discussed about the Histogram in my previous thread, maybe this could help me again here.
This helped me realize that some of my pictures were way too dark.
The second point is that development should be done with the monitor (and likely the room) at a fixed brightness(the brightness you calibrate it at) to help combat variable ambient brightness.
I used to care more about this last point, but since I started using the color assessment tool I stopped worrying and now do what’s more convenient for me. The prints come out looking exactly like they do on the screen, and the image is also consistent between screens, tvs, and my phone.
I’m not a pro, and my prints are for myself, or close relatives, so this is just my 2cs.
Ok thanks for the info, I will study the color assessment and try to modify my images at the same brightness in my room.
My first idea was a problem with how people tune their monitors compared to me, if they use very different brightness, contrast, gamma and maybe the blue filter.
I had the same problem with my older 22" monitor.
UPDATE
The histogram of my picture is pretty dark… by thinking of it, yesterday I made my adjustments without looking at the darktable histogram. I always like to adjust my pictures way to dark. what a bummer.
Maybe I’ll Playraw this picture later to see how people would adjust, again. This is killing me, I thought it was perfect yesterday and today, it’s way too underexposed. ( However, it’s much better on my proart then on my Lenovo)
It is possible that you have installed a display profile that is wrong. A display profile tells colour-managed applications and/or the operating system, how to ‘present’ (encode) the colours in your image so it appears correctly on you display. If this profile is wrong (e.g. would normally make images too bright), you will make edits that are too dark; the combined effect is that the images appear correct to you, but not to others.
If you download a known-to-be-good image (e.g. you check it on your phone), and load it into darktable, does it appear as you saw it on your ‘reference device’ (phone)?
Conversely, if you copy one of your exported JPGs onto your phone (via USB, or by uploading it to the net), and check it on your phone, does it look OK?
A final possibility is that you do not export as sRGB, but some other space. Many software will treat all JPGs as sRGB, but if you export in e.g. linear Rec 2020, it will appear dark to others. Reimported into darktable (which respects the embedded profile) will correct the colours.
BTW, in darktable, is your display profile set to system display profile or sRGB (which is a fair approximation of the ‘average’ display)? If it’s set to a profile like linear Rec 2020, then that’s probably wrong. You can check/set it here:
The key to success is to colour manage your entire workflow, including all hardware and software levels. That is, making sure that colour is standardized no matter the capturing, editing or viewing device. It is a technical topic, but necessary to understand.
PS - Other reason is that the dynamic ranges, colour attributes and display features of the media/devices can be very different. Even with calibration/profiling and colour management, the depth and contrast of colour can vary, but without the two, you will not get anything consistent which is the most important thing in digital photography.
Your monitors are likely too bright. That’s the number one error most ppl do. Since they are too bright, your edits make the image darker so it looks good in your monitor, but it looks dark in any other monitor/cellphone.
Yeah agreed, colour profiling is good, but getting consistent brightness is hard, especially when you’re sometimes editing in daylight and sometimes in the evenings. It’s a problem I struggle with as well and I’ve yet to find a reasonable solution. Bear in mind that a lot of screens are very bright and high contrast out of the box (they look great in the shop) and some people never even venture into the settings to change the defaults.
You all type so incredibly fast. I was only in the editing phase when all your posts popped up. @Pic-N3p I see your edit: yes, sharing Play Raw s is a good way to judge your performance. I do that to gauge whether I am too dark or bright in my personal post-processing. Then compensate.
…and sometimes the colour profile isn’t the culprit, but the problem is, that the correction is used double. If you have set a general correction for your screen and set a profile in DT the profile is in double use.
Also there is so much voodo on monitors these days dynamic this and that, black boost etc… unless you turn it all off and then also profile and calibrate your monitor its often hard to say and even then all you can do is control things on your end…sharing your image in a calibrated standard color profile and rely on the others to have things set correctly on their end… For sure I think most monitors would out of the box or from fiddling by the user be set way to bright and contrasted. I know mine was. I have a pretty average monitor and to calibrate it to a standard brightness I had to dial it back to around 44% on a zero to 100 slider for brightness…
Any chance you have any of this sort of auto brightness activated on your monitor…
That could also be changing your perception of images esp if the light changes in your room…
How would that happen? On both Windows and Linux, I installed the display profile as a system setting. The OS does 2 things:
loads the LUT stored in the profile into the video card LUT (if present). This is the result of calibrating the display (bringing it into a ‘known, target state’ - quote from Elle Stone). This changes how the picture will appear for all software, colour-managed or not, as the modification is in the hardware;
makes the display profile (which describes the properties of the calibrated display, taking into account any LUT) available to applications, so they know how to drive the display.
If you follow the proper steps, there is no ‘double application of the profile’.
It is my understanding that one could take the very simple approach and forgo the LUT and the profile, take a calibration device + software, and alter the monitor’s behaviour via its controls to be as close to sRGB as possible, and skip colour management everywhere. Since sRGB is the default, images should look OK. A possible improvement is to also create a LUT during calibration, loading it into the video card, bringing the display even closer to the calibration target (e.g. sRGB). No profiling is needed, apps can continue to drive the display as sRGB.
The, one can profile the calibrated device, to be able to tell colour-managed applications about its characteristics.
It’s also possible not to calibrate at all (leave the display in its native state, not trying to bring it close to any well-known standard like sRGB), but still profile it. The drawback is that non-colour-managed applications (driving the display in generic sRGB) will not be accurate; colour-managed applications, however, may make the best use of the display (via the profile).
(The text above is correct if and only if I understood Monitor profile, calibrate, system install, and if Elle was right; the latter is highly probable, the former is less so.)
To be honest, I have no clue. I tried half the evening to replicate what I experienced when I started with colour calibration (around one and a half year ago). But I couldn’t. Maybe there was a bug at this time. Or I did something really strange at this time.
I still have some problems with colour management, but this has only to do with my multi monitor setup. And I think on always changing screen setups, there are still some bigger flaws on KDE - at least under Xorg. Maybe when everything is nicley implemented in wayland these problems are history. But nowadays I’ve gotten into the habit of restarting the whole machine when changing screen setup and wanting to do some picture work after these changes.
Even when you change monitor setup on the running system? I have to use one of my screens (the main screen) for home office every day. And most of the time after that in colour management there is only one monitor shown whereas in the display settings both are there. Worse: Most of the time the main monitor is correlated with the profile of the second screen. A reboot fixes it every time, so it’s not the biggest of all problems. Nowadays a reboot is that quick that it is acceptable.
In my Proart monitor settings, I can configure the preset to sRGB instead of standard, it makes the screen much darker. It looks like a preset to work with images.
My photos look like what I see on other monitors, very dark.
I think, if I process my pictures using sRGB, they will look brighter on other monitors.
What model do you have?? Does it by any chance have internal calibration??
Sounds like your monitor was setup too bright and the preset has restored defaults and set it in sRGB mode. This will likely fix your brightness issue by the sounds of it but if your monitor does has a wider native gamut you might be missing out on that until you can properly calibrate and profile it so that color management will work as intended…
I’ve got the ProArt PS247CV supposed to be calibrated but I have no physical tools to verify any of this.
The standard preset is MUCH brighter then the sRGB or Rec. 709 mode. It’s much brighter then anything I have seen, but like you said, it’s probably boosting everything by default, to show off the panel. (and it’s impressive in my opinion)
I’ve done a test.
A. The picture on the left was processed yesterday with the standard preset and it would be too dark on other monitors, the ground especially.
B. The picture on the right, I did it in the ProArt sRGB preset, and I like it as much as the one on the left.
C. The picture on the right, is too bright on the standard preset.
It’s speaks for itself… I will test the picture made with sRGB using other monitors to see how they look. If it’s ok and bright enough, I might start using the sRGB preset or Rec. 709 mode on the ProArt.
Instead of the color assessment mode I activate the framing module and the default settings place a white border around the image. The reason I prefer this over the color assessment tool is my image is much larger for editing compared to the color assessment tool.
what a bummer.
