Native Resolution

[K9Kirk]

Up until recently I used to be a gamer (FPS mostly) and due to problems with the frame rate with graphics settings I was running my monitor at a resolution lower than the native for my LCD TV and that's fine for gaming. When I got back into taking pictures I found myself using a digital camera instead of the film cameras that I was used to using and I didn't think to change my TV's resolution back to native.

Here all this time I've been using a digital camera I thought my pictures look OK except for one friend who was honest enough to tell me he didn't like my pictures, said they looked too dark for his taste. I tried changing the way I edited my pictures and he said later that they looked better but I could tell he wasn't 100% with them quite yet but I didn't inquire as to why. I wrote it off to "people having different tastes" and kept doing what I was doing for awhile until yesterday I seemed to have had an epiphany of sorts. I was at the computer and had this strong urge to check my TV's resolution and found it well below it's native resolution. So I then research the problems with running below NR and found at least one of the reasons why my pictures always had a soft, blurriness to them.

As you can imagine I felt like Forrest Gump when I realized my mistake and how I could let it go on for so long without suspecting my lowered NR as the problem or at least part of it but everything else looked fine to me. I'm looking at old pictures now and I'm assuming I'm seeing how everyone else but myself saw them, all dark and over saturated. what a difference it made. Apparently, not only does native resolution increase the amount of pixels for increased sharpness but for proper color rendering as well. With less pixels straining to reproduce what more pixels do with ease it appears I was having to over compensate with saturation to make the colors look right on this monitor, terribly wrong on others.

So, if your pictures aren't looking sharp for any reason, maybe you're gamer like me, don't forget to check to see if you're running your monitor in it's native resolution.

 

[Derrel]

"Life is like a box of chocolates."

 

[K9Kirk]

"Life is like a box of chocolates."

lol, right!

 

[AlanKlein]

Check your picture's histogram to see if you have the full range of brightness. Often, people will post pictures that appear too dark. When I look at the histogram for them, they're cut-off at let's say 225 rather than going all the way to 255.

Also, a calibrated monitor to use when you edit will provide better results. The final image should be created as a RGB as the web only uses those for their color space.

Regarding TV's, on mine there are different settings for picture brightness such as Normal, Sports (tend to be brighter and more saturated), movies (which I don't like-I find them too dark), Custom, etc. . Also TV's have specific adjustments for brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. These settings have huge effects on the display. I also have a setting that adjusts the output to full 4k range even if the input is let's say 2K or HD. The TV uprez's the resolution to match the full 4k range of the TV if the original signal is less than 4K. When I create slide shows, I size them for 4K if I plan to show them on my 4K TV. Good luck.

 

[AlanKlein]

Here's a slide show I put on video up to 4K. It's on Youtube. You can select 4K, 2K, 720 or smaller and see how it looks on your monitor and TV in the different resolutions. Click on the settings icon to select the resolution.

 

[Jeff15]

I calibrate my monitor every month using a Spyder 5......

 

[K9Kirk]

My TV only goes up to 1080p, it doesn't have the capability to upscale and show things @ 4k res. I'm considering getting a decent 4k monitor that's made for editing but that's another $400 + dollars for a 32". If there's a reeeeeal big difference between 1080p and 4k on a 32" monitor I'll jump. All this has me wondering if what looks good to me on my TV looks bad to others with monitors that have higher resolution.