Darkness prevails.

A

AndyCapp

Guest
Is it my aging eyes or the calibration of my two Macs or why do I find so many pictures here far too dark to see the subject, let alone spot shadow details?
Can anybody give me an explanation?
 
It might be the calibration of your Macs, or even your browser. Pictures posted here do not look at all dark on my Dell Windows 10 laptop computer running Firefox.

- Murray
 
CMur12 said:
It might be the calibration of your Macs, or even your browser. Pictures posted here do not look at all dark on my Dell Windows 10 laptop computer running Firefox.

- Murray
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The calibration seems OK on Flickr, FaceBook, X, and South China Morning Post.
Edit: Wall Street Journal, Euronews, and Asia Times are also OK.
 
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Some of my pictures look ok on my laptop but look very dark on my phone. Also someone else commented once that some of my pictures seem very dark on their monitor although they look ok on my old and held-together-by-tape laptop screen.
 
p.giannakis said:
Some of my pictures look ok on my laptop but look very dark on my phone. Also someone else commented once that some of my pictures seem very dark on their monitor although they look ok on my old and held-together-by-tape laptop screen.
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Could it be that some photos are dark while others are not?
 
It has been a while since I have used a Mac regularly but with my PC I there are settings to adjust screen brightness. Some settings I recall automatically sets the brightness, I believe based on ambient brightness of the room but I always turn this off and make my own adjustments using manual controls as I find that this auto setting has a tendency to render images too dark. Could it be this kind of issue?
 
peterm1 said:
It has been a while since I have used a Mac regularly but with my PC I there are settings to adjust screen brightness. Some settings I recall automatically sets the brightness, I believe based on ambient brightness of the room but I always turn this off and make my own adjustments using manual controls as I find that this auto setting has a tendency to render images too dark. Could it be this kind of issue?
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No.
"There are settings to adjust screen brightness" :cool:
 
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AndyCapp said:
South China Morning Post.
Edit: Wall Street Journal, Euronews, and Asia Times are also OK.
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I have enough experience with news outlets to be able to confidently say that news photos are calibrated in a very odd way that maximises how the photos look on a very broad range of monitors. Do not judge anything about your screen from news photos.

Is your screen calibrated? Macs do not have internal calibration, and drift a lot over time. Get a calibration device and calibrate your screens if they aren’t, particularly if you want to print. A calibration device costs about 1% the cost of a Leica M11 but is vital if you want to make good output from that, or any other, nice camera.

Marty
 
Freakscene said:
I have enough experience with news outlets to be able to confidently say that news photos are calibrated in a very odd way that maximises how the photos look on a very broad range of monitors. Do not judge anything about your screen from news photos.

Is your screen calibrated? Macs do not have internal calibration, and drift a lot over time. Get a calibration device and calibrate your screens if they aren’t, particularly if you want to print. A calibration device costs about 1% the cost of a Leica M11 but is vital if you want to make good output from that, or any other, nice camera.

Marty
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I have the X-Rite. They changed their name; it was quite messy to update to Mac OS Sonoma.
So, yes.
 
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AndyCapp said:
I have the X-rite.
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What gamma and brightness are you calibrated to?

If you are calibrated to Mac standard gamma of 1.8, photos adjusted to PC gamma of 2.2 look really off. But usually they are too light and contrasty.
 
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There are photos here that look dark to me, too, but I place the cause of that on the original photographer who either doesn't have the chops to properly process their images or who doesn't have a sense of what a properly processed b/w image "should" look like. Tastes do vary.
 
Some fairly prolific posters here print quite dark imo. And it's been my experience that many "art" photos are printed darker than commercial stuff.

I'm not making any judgment about whether it's good or bad and I certainly support any artist printing however they desire. Just personal observation.
 
I use Macs and have calibrated monitors. Like others have said some photographers images here look dark and others don't. So I suspect it is their processing and calibration that may be the problem rather than yours.
 
mrtoml said:
I use Macs and have calibrated monitors. Like others have said some photographers images here look dark and others don't. So I suspect it is their processing and calibration that may be the problem rather than yours.
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Are you suggesting that recalibrating my monitors might not resolve the issue? :cool:
 
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It won't resolve the issue if the problem is with the other poster's calibration or processing.

But you cannot hope to figure out if there is an issue if your own system is not calibrated.

If your system is calibrated properly then you should see pretty much what someone else is seeing on their own properly calibrated system.

I suspect a lot of people don't calibrate very well so what they post might look OK on their system, but not to anyone else on the internet.
 
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