Compensating for Monitor Brightness (or lack thereof)

rleigh

So I edited 25 photos from a wedding this weekend. They looked stunning on my screen.
I went to work and checked on two different monitors... One was some sort of flat screen PC that has not so good color display anyhow, but the other was a one year old iMac. The pictures looked quite a bit darker on both, and in turn they also looked pretty flat.
Then, I came home and did a side by side view on my PC and laptop and I am really taken aback at the extreme difference. I knew it was bad, but holy moly!
So I love my screen dearly, but apparently it's brighter and a LOT more vivid than most.
So I guess I need to get them printed and see what they look like. (unrelated, but any online printer suggestions?)

Question... since many friends and such will be viewing them online, this scares me. If I'd seen those photos on any of those 3 screens before I saw them on mine, I probably would have been less than impressed. Should I overcompensate on brightness/exposure when post-processing or just leave as is? I know everyone's screen will be different..... Blah!

JBHotShots

A good start:

http://lightroomkillertips.com/2010/video-the-trick-to-getting-brigher-prints/

Art Scott

are any of the monitors you use calibrated??

are any of the browsers you use color managed??

This could easily be your problem.................

I believe that IE is still not color managed, as my work looks waaaay different than when viewing on FireFox (which is color managed).........

colourbox

The very first step in calibration is to set the correct level of brightness. Since your monitors are all over the place, it's no surprise that there is no consistency. On my desktop the correct level that makes my prints match when calibrated is almost the minimum brightness. On my laptop, it's about 80% brightness.

While everyone's monitor is different, you at least want to be predictable even if most other monitors aren't. That way, at least your pics look good on other calibrated monitors...

arodney

LouDoggsRuca wrote: »

A good start:

http://lightroomkillertips.com/2010/video-the-trick-to-getting-brigher-prints/

No, that’s really poor advise for a problem that’s based on improper display calibration. The solution of using an edit, either in LR or Photoshop to adjust RGB values that are correct but appear dark is a kludge!

The right answers, at least in terms of proper color management are here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/why_are_my_prints_too_dark.shtml