Help...pictures not looking the same

[ewbug]

I have the canon 30d, I mainly shoot aperture or shutter speed priority. I download them onto "zoom browser" (which is canon's program that came with the camera), but I store and view them in picasa.

After I take my picture everything is set correct it looks beautiful on my lcd screen but, when I download it onto my computer the pictures look grey/blah and I have to adjust them to match my lcd screen better.

I thought it was my monitor but viewing other photo blogs, the pictures colors are fine. PLEASE any ideas or suggestions would help:thumbup:

 

[sovietdoc]

Maybe your monitor is not calibrated?

 

[ewbug]

I thought it may have been that also, however, the other pictures people post look great. Could it be anything else?

 

[sovietdoc]

You could try opening them with windows photo viewer or something else, just to see if the color is bad in all programs or just one selectively.

 

[ewbug]

Thanks, I'll try it.

 

[Misfitlimp]

Post some please.

 

[Overread]

I'm a little confused here as to what the problem is.

I think what you are saying is that the photos you take look better on your LCD than they do on your computer - and that you then go on to say that other peoples photos online also look better than your photos do straight out of the camera.

To that I would firstly say don't compare your LCD to other shots online - you're comparing auto preset edited in camera shots (on a tiny rubbishy uncalibrated screen) to edited (however minor or major) finished products online. Editing IS a part of the photographic process be it film or digital - the only difference is that you can turn your mind off and let the camera/computer do auto editing on the photos for quick results.

Secondly calibrating your computer monitor does help but there are a few things to bare in mind:
1) To calibrate you HAVE to use a hardware based calibration setup - that means something like a Spyder 3 - this is because you need unbais hardware to read the light and allow you to calibrate it. Your eyes and free websites to calibrate your screen can't do this because our eyes are both subjective and adatapive and thus do not give you "true colour".

2) LCD screens are notorious for having contrast changes as you change your viewing angle (up and down). If this is the case for your monitor then understand that even with hardware calibration, whilst you have significantly improved the output you are still limited by this contrast changing aspect. There are LCD screens that don't have the contrast changing, though they are far more expensive - they get even more expensive still if you view DVDs/play computer games and thus need a fast refresh rate as well.

3) Make sure that when you edit and save your photos that you are saving them as sRBG colour space and not adobe or any other when you are uploading them to the net. The net reads only sRGB and other colour spaces will be ignored by most users of the net.*


* some internet browsers do read the profiles, but many (eg internet explorer) don't and thus sRGB is the internet standard.

 

[MrBarney]

Just throwing something out there. Are you shooting in RAW?

Only, the in camera view will include any photo "styles" you have set - sharpening, vibrance etc., but these modifications will not be shown in something like Zoom Browser and the photos may look a little soft and dull. Perhaps try a few in "RAW+JPEG" and see if the jpegs are more what you were expecting, or use DPP to see the RAW with style applied? Not that I recommend using styles generally, but it might explain some of the difference.