Are you worried about calibration of clients monitors?

[ClickAddict]

I've been learning a lot and improving my technique over the last year and am not currently (perhaps one day) charging for any photography services so I am taking my time learning 1 thing and working on it until I'm satisfied and then moving on to another. That being said, I knew early on that having a calibrated monitor was important. I have a monitor at work and one home and compared photos on both and they looked pretty much the same so I figured for the time being they were probably not too far off and ok for what I was doing at the time. (Ha ha rookie mistake)

I noticed when editing in LR that I frequently would bump up the darks cause they just looked better than what came out of the camera. Today I was looking at my pics from another computer and they seemed dark. (Didn't take me more than a second to figure out why. :x From the office I used some basic software calibration and now realize I want to re-edit a good portion of everything I have online. (Their not overly dark, just bumped the darks from like 5 to 8-9. Looks fine in some photos but others need scaling back.) Weekend project :lmao:

Long story to get to the point, but it made me wonder. Once I get my home computer calibrated and running fine, what's to stop a friend from viewing my pics and saying "too dark, two light, too much red...." based on the fact that HIS monitor might be uncalibrated.

For those of you who post proofs for customers to view and I suppose for anyone who puts a gallery/oprtfolio of their work online, do you worry about customers' calibration or just admit it's out of your control and live with the fact some people wont see what you want them to see?

 

[tirediron]

I explain to clients that I edit for print, and that if their monitor is not correctly calibrated some colours/tones may not display properly.

 

[KmH]

Are you worried about calibration of clients monitors?

No, because that is totally beyond my control.

By the same token you have no control over online display either, because of variances between browsers.

In short, online, or any other type of electronic display, is a poor way to try and show off your images.

 

[Big Mike]

The best you can do, is to make sure that everything is fine/correct on your end.

You can't control other people's viewing, so don't try. However, if you/they are using a good lab to get prints, you should be able to count on that lab to be properly calibrated, and thus the prints should be fairly similar to what you see on your calibrated screen. To take that a step further, you can download the profile for the lab's printer, and use that to 'soft proof' your images.

And of course, it can help to educate the clients, so that they know that what they are seeing, may not reflect the actual image file.