appearance of shadow areas on screen

[KenC]

In your experience, does an area in which all the pixels are pretty close to RGB (20,20,20) on the PS 0-255 scale look almost black when: (1) displayed on a monitor screen, or (2) projected from a digital projector? When I say "almost black" I mean it looks black unless displayed next to a true (0,0,0) black. In my experience, on several monitors I have used this value does look "almost black" and the PS-controlled prints I have made look almost identical in all respects to what was on my monitor. However, I recently saw one of my images which had a large background area mostly at (20,20,20) projected on a screen from a digital projector and that area looked dark gray (about 2 stops from black in my estimation) and showed some marks and other details I had darkened the background to hide. I couldn't convince the person using the projector that it was much too bright.

 

[KenC]

anyone?

 

[Derrel]

If 20-20-20 looks dark gray, the projector is awfully,awfully bright!!!

 

[KenC]

Thanks for the reality check.

 

[Garbz]

My advice is a) be a little more patient since some of us only check this site once a day. Your message won't be missed .

b) Fire up a set of decent monitor test images: LCD monitor test images

 

[KenC]

Thanks, Garbz. I forgot about you folks about 12 hours out of sync with me, and also that someone actually might not look at this site for a whole day (somehow). It turns out my monitor is very close to where it should be, perhaps slightly darker than optimum, but not nearly enough to account for what I saw the other day.