Hours of PS work trashed -- I think my screen shows false colors

Poyke · Oct 28, 2012

I shot my friend with a canon 650D, few lights and edited the photo for over an hour to get the right colors on my laptop.
turns out when watching from my PC and Galaxy S3 that the photos turned out yellowish and over-saturated.
i know galaxy over does everything - contrst colors and brightness....

when watching a screenshot taken by my galaxy of the over-saturated photo on my laptop the colors look fine. and no trace of yellow glow.
What should I do????
Is it that bad?

480sparky · Oct 28, 2012

Poyke said:
..........What should I do????............

Don't use your laptop to edit, use your desktop instead.......... and calibrate your desktop monitor.

MLeeK · Oct 28, 2012

No matter what monitor you use it has to be calibrated. And a laptop is the #1 worst choice for editing. If you MUST use a laptop you should have an external monitor on it.
THose are very orange and over saturated, although not electrically over saturated.

Overread · Oct 28, 2012

As said you ideally want a calibrated external monitor for editing properly. Note that calibrated means using a hardware calibration device such as a Spyder 3, you need hardware to do this properly as you can't use the "free" online options since they rely upon your eyes and your eyes are not fixed, they are adaptive and thus not reliable to calibrate.

Note also that when it comes to think like contrast and saturation, even on a calibrated screen you'll need to keep your head facing straight at the screen as much as possible with typical market LCD screens. This is because changes in the angle of view will change the contrast of the scene. You can get LCD screens which do not have this properly, however they will cost you more (and in laptops are only in the highest price bands typically). CRT (ie the old style big monitors) don't have this problem, however they've sadly pretty much vanished from the market these days.

kathyt · Oct 28, 2012

480sparky said:
Poyke said:

..........What should I do????............

Click to expand...

Don't use your laptop to edit, use your desktop instead.......... and calibrate your desktop monitor.

Yep, yep and yep. My laptop sucks. I have to use my desktop to edit. It is a night and day difference between a calibrated monitor and an uncalibrated monitor. I usually calibrate about once a week unless I edit at a different time than I normally do then I will do a quick calibration to make sure I am where I need to be.

runnah · Oct 28, 2012

When I worked in the printing world you would not believe how often I had to deal with pissed off customers who were mad that the prints looked nothing like what they say on their screen. One lady actually brought in her laptop to show me!

I have eye damage from how often i rolled them.

Poyke · Oct 28, 2012

How would I calibrate my desktop screen without the hardware?

Overread · Oct 28, 2012

Poyke said:
How would I calibrate my desktop screen without the hardware?

You can't.
There are some brightness tests around, however you honestly can't deal with colour shifts or proper contrast/saturation yourself. As said above, your eyes are too adaptive to give reliable results. Sadly this is one area where hardware is needed.

TCampbell · Oct 28, 2012

If you want to get accurate colors, you need a color-managed workflow. This minimally requires two things for basic color and you can do more depending on how much control you want.

1) You need a gray card. Don't trust the white balance in your camera. Don't trust the lights. Gray cards are CHEAP. Don't try to save money by getting something you think qualifies as a neutral balance target... go for a real "gray card" (because they aren't expensive and then you'll KNOW your white-balance is accurate.) You can also get color checker targets for even more accurate color, but the gray-card is usually adequate for all but commercial applications (if you were selling products that come in colors and your photos of the products NEED to be really accurate then you'd take this to the next level.)

2) You need to calibrate your monitor. The calibration tools are made by X-Rite (the Colormunki) and Datacolor (the Spyder). Datacolor makes an entry-level model that costs about $110. X-Rites entry model (which is actually more capable than Datacolor's entry model) is about $170. (there are higher-end models with more capabilities and which also calibrate printers.)

There's really no cheap way out that works reliably.

I bought mine after one specific incident that I vividly recall. I performed a manual color calibration of my monitor using the operating systems built-in tools. These tools show images specifically designed to allow your eye to detect differences and tweak the colors, but there's no calibration "tool". It's all manual. I noted that the before colors were pretty washed out (they were obviously wrong) and the "after" colors looked much better. I was convinced that while my monitor probably wasn't perfect, it was probably good enough. Boy was I ever wrong.

I shot some photos of wine crates and racks and adjusted the images in post to be fairly accurate. I shared the photos with others. I CONSISTENTLY got the comment from others that the images looked rather "orange". I re-checked the photos and confirmed they look good. Well... the wood does have a yellowed look to it, so I assumed they're just not used to what wine crates look like and shrugged it off.

THEN I got an opportunity to look at my photos on someone else's monitor. WOW! Did they ever look orange. NOW I understood what everyone else was talking about. My monitor, though I thought it was good enough (and for a lot of colors it was close) was waaaay off in this area.

I broke down and bought a calibrator and have never had another problem again. In fact... I'm even very careful when I send images out for printing. I wont use a service without learning something about their color calibration and make sure they're aware that I have managed the color through the workflow and expect that as a professional lab they will do the same.

If you print at Costco (of all places... I never expected this) you can actually download the color management profiles of the specific printers at the stores you use. That way if you are managing your color, you can be sure that the prints you pick up will actually match the colors you expected.

480sparky · Oct 28, 2012

Poyke said:
How would I calibrate my desktop screen without the hardware?

You buy the hardware.

Tee · Oct 28, 2012

The bigger issue is why did it take hours in Photoshop? With proper exposure, it should've taken 2 minutes to get what you thought was a good image.

panblue · Oct 28, 2012

ColorWiki - Color Management Myths 16-20

When you calibrate your display with a hardware device, a few important functions occur. First, the device measures the colors of the phosphors (CRT) or filters (LCD) of your display. Then it sets (often with your help) the maximum output for each RGB channel, balancing them to obtain the white point you requested (D50, D65, etc). Finally it "ramps" up in each RGB channel and sets the gamma in your graphics card. This fine-tunes the curves for each channel, ensuring that they have smooth color transitions from 0 to 255, compensating for any non-linearities in your graphics card or display, and makes sure that equal RGB values are gray all the way from black to white.

When you calibrate with a "by eye" system it asks you which monitor you have (to estimate the phosphor / filter colors), allows you to choose a white point (sometimes letting you fudge it by moving a slider) and also sets the requested gamma in the graphics card. Sometimes the system can obtain the phosphor/filter colors directly from your display through its cable. The problem is that each of these are an estimate and the errors introduced at each step can compound to greatly reduce the accuracy of the resulting profile.

Let's break these down:

White Point. You asked for D65. A hardware calibrator will measure your display, adjust the maximum output of the graphics card, and ensure you get D65. "By eye" calibration will set the graphics card at some preset and then hope you get something close to D65. Your display's native white point will play a huge role in affecting the actual white you see and the software has no idea whether it's in the ball park or not. Not good.
Phosphor / Filter Colors. A hardware calibrator measures these for use in the resulting profile. "By eye" calibration may obtain the numbers from the display or it may ask you for what type of screen you think it is and then substitute numbers it has from a table. This means the software is guessing. The results will range from "OK" to "poor" and will mean the more saturated colors on your display could show noticeable hue shifts (tomato reds , purple blues, etc).
Gamma. If you want a gamma of 2.2 a hardware calibrator will give it to you. Software will show you a small graphic that requires moving a slider until two elements match in intensity. This software method is better than nothing but nowhere near what hardware can do. This also plays a role in neutrals...
Gray Neutrals. A hardware calibrator measures each R=G=B combination from 0 to 255 to ensure that they create neutral gray all the way from black to white AND that the transition is as smooth as possible. Your display, graphics card, cables, system software and other pieces all conspire to make curves bumpy. Measuring carefully at each step helps smooth them out.
Repeatability. No matter how good a job you do with "by eye" calibration, the next time will probably be noticeably different. If you calibrate regularly (you ARE calibrating regularly right!?), hardware calibration will keep your system stable. "By eye" calibration could introduce more fluctuation into your system than if you had left it alone! scary.

Should "by eye" calibration be avoided at all costs? Not necessarily. Sometimes you are out presenting somewhere and want the overhead system to look good. If you don't have a Beamer then a quick run through of software calibration can help. It always seems to improve things for me. But for a desktop system you want to believe, use a hardware device. The price of such devices has come down to the point where it is affordable and should really be the first dollars you spend on color management.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Upton

FocusAndPlay · Oct 29, 2012

Generally speaking Laptops have budget screens that are not good for editing photos. I had the same problem when I got started in digital photography.
As most people here are saying, get an external monitor and use a calibration device to get everything spot on. I still use my laptop, but I use a higher end Asus ips monitor calibrated with a Spyder3. It is worth the extra money and is a must if your serious about editing photographs on your computer.