Photos in Photoshop are too dark on Mac, cannot see details

[dundyable]

Hi guys,

I'm just starting in digital imagery and I've been playing with Photoshop CS 5 for a while on my iMac (previous model) running Lion (10.7.5). I found that all the photos are quite dark and have good contrast on my screen but when viewed on another machine or iPhone 4 become rather flat. I can understand Mac and Windows have different default gamma values but my main problem is that I cannot even adjust contrast with Curves or Levels, cause the pictures are already so dark on my screen! So when I start to play with the curves photos turn into a complete dark mess. I think I could solve that problem somehow by viewing my photos at 100% but that's not quite practical for me. I tried to calibrate the monitor with an in-built plug-in to make the things a bit lighter, but still have problems and the native calibration preset on my machine gives me even darker (slightly) results. Quite confused about all that stuff.

Thank you for your help

 

[SCraig]

I know nothing about Macs but it sounds to me like it's time to look into a hardware calibration device to get things set right.

 

[KmH]

What gamma is you iMac screen set to?
Xrite CMUNDIS ColorMunki Display
http://xritephoto.com/ph_learning.aspx

• Color Management, Part 1: Concept & Overview
• Color Management, Part 2: Color Spaces
• Color Management, Part 3: Color Space Conversion

 

[dundyable]

What gamma is you iMac screen set to?

Should be 2.2, as I ticked "native" when doing my own calibration with the iMac in-built plug-in. I cannot really find what the current value is as there is nothing about it in the calibration preset profile.

Thank you very much for the links, KmH, hopefully will find an answer soon

 

[creisinger]

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong but if the monitor is set to a "wrong" gamma value shouldn't all content on the screen be too dark/bright and not just the photos?

 

[TCampbell]

The only way to _truly_ be certain that your display is showing proper color values and brightness levels is to use a calibration tool. I use an XRite ColorMunki.

 

[KmH]

X-Rite now makes 2 kinds of ColorMunki.

The one I linked to above is a colorimeter and can only calibrate a display.

The other, more expensive ColorMunki is a spectrophotometer and can calibrate and profile displays, printers, scanners, and projectors.
The spectrophotometer version will give a more accurate display calibration than the colorimeter can.

 

[Derrel]

Maybe your photos are underexposed. If web pages, and the photos of the majority of folks on say Flickr or pBase.com all appear "correct", then the issue is most likely with you and your working methods. For example...many people who are "new to digital imagery" as you stated you are, tend to expose images based on the LCD screen of their camera...and of course, if the LCD screen is set to a high brightness level, then even severely underexposed images will appear "okay" on the camera, and the user will think that the images have been exposed properly.

Perhaps you could post a representative sample photo, one that appears too dark on your Mac, and we could look at its histogram?