Question for Mac users-Delivering Photos to Customer

bradracino · Apr 6, 2009

Hey everyone,

This is probably a basic question but something I was never taught in school or told by anyone... if you are editing with a Mac (which I assume most photographers do) and you are going to be giving the photos to a customer who has a PC (which they usually do), do you do any extra editing on the photos to make them look better on PCs? I know that PCs have a different gamma output, or something along those lines, and I need to know what if I've been spending countless hours editing a picture to be perfect, only to give them to a customer and have them see them not as I had made them to be?

I have bootcamp on my Macbook Pro, and I recently finished a photo shoot with a model at sunset... the pictures came out BEAUTIFUL, but I knew she's a PC user... so I emailed five of the photos to myself, then turned my computer into Windows mode, and checked them. Three out of five of them were completely devoid of the 'pop' that I had put into the originals. How do I know what is going to look good on a PC and what is not?

Any help-greatly appreciated...thanks everyone.

PS-Also, if she's going to be putting these on the web, do I need to make an extra DVD of images that are Web-ready colors or something? Because I know for my website I had to pretty much boost saturation on all my images by 25% in order to make them look normal on the website

JerryPH · Apr 6, 2009

bradracino said:
if you are editing with a Mac (which I assume most photographers do) and you are going to be giving the photos to a customer who has a PC (which they usually do), do you do any extra editing on the photos to make them look better on PCs?

- If your monitor is calibrated and the PC user's monitor is calibrated, the pics will look identical.

- If the PC user's is calibrated and yours is not, the pics will look off. Visa-versa is true too.

bradracino said:
I need to know what if I've been spending countless hours editing a picture to be perfect, only to give them to a customer and have them see them not as I had made them to be?

Calibration is the key, whether it is Mac or PC is not the important issue.

bradracino said:
I have bootcamp on my Macbook Pro, and I recently finished a photo shoot with a model at sunset... the pictures came out BEAUTIFUL, but I knew she's a PC user... so I emailed five of the photos to myself, then turned my computer into Windows mode, and checked them. Three out of five of them were completely devoid of the 'pop' that I had put into the originals. How do I know what is going to look good on a PC and what is not?

If you try to match your profiles to every client you have, you are going to go nuts. The best and ONLY thing that you should be making sure is that you and your setup are showing the correct colours. That comes by calibrating the monitor and if you are printing... calibrating your printer too.

You cannot compensate for your client... who could possibly know what equipment they have and whether or not they are calibrated? This is not your responsability... if they turn their monitor 50% green, are you going to shift your colours just so that the pics look good on their screen? Of course not.

bradracino said:
PS-Also, if she's going to be putting these on the web, do I need to make an extra DVD of images that are Web-ready colors or something?

First you make sure that you export in sRGB format and second, "for the web" means not more than 72 DPI (possibly even lower), and not more than about 250 pixels on the long side, but this last one is disputable depending on website layout and needs. No matter what, though, I *never* would exceed 500 pixel sizes for the web under any circumstance. Easy to steal and print or use.