How to Encourage website visitors to Adjust their Monitors?

kmsPhoto

I am designing a photography website. For my own use I have high-end calibrated monitor. When test viewing my new website images on another computer monitor belonging to a friend they appeared very washed out... the monitor brightness was set to 90 out of 100. This must be a common problem as website visitors probably don't pay much attention to monitor setting.

After viewing over a dozen professional and other photo websites, no where did I find a webpage or suggestion by the site owner to adjust the brightness and contrast for best viewing results of the sites images. I would think it would be a common practice for site owners to suggest visitors adjust their monitor brightness and contrast to a supplied test target (provided by the site owner). ...especially if the photographer wants to sell images?

I know there are websites that provide test targets that a visitor could use (if motivated) to adjust their own monitor prior to viewing the photographers website images.

1) Do you know of any websites that suggest the visitor adjust brightness and contrast before viewing images? (I'd like to see how that suggestion is implemented)
2) Do you know which test images I might use (for free) if I include such a page on my own website?

Thanks for any comments or suggestions/
Ken
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www.spark-of-light-photography.com

Lille Ulven

Hi kmsPhoto

I think your idea sounds great. One website that I know uses something in that direction is https://ephotozine.com/ - at the bottom of the site they have a little black to white bar on which you are supposed to see 16 different shades from black to white. And then there is the good old xrite.com "how good do you think your color vision is" test...maybe they have something else one could use for the purpose???

Good luck

Lille Ulven

kmsPhoto

Lille,

Thanks for the pointer to the website. Since posting I made a few discoveries. Monitors set for sRGB are supposed to be standardized so I expected the comparison test monitor I was using (an Asus V278H), when set to viewing mode sRGB, would closely reproduce what I saw on my own calibrated monitor when viewing my own converted sRGB photos. On this particular Asus monitor that helped, BUT they still appear too light to me (and so do the ones when viewing your website) See the reference (Google "Color-for-Web-Designers-Understanding-sRGB") [I can't post actual links yet for some reason]

Next I made an objective assessment comparing my calibrated monitor (NEC PA271W) to the Asus monitor in sRGB viewing mode. To do this comparison I used the Mid-Tone target found at the Cambridge Color site: Google "Cambridge color tutorials". One my monitor the central square is indistinquishable from the background when I move back about 2 ft from the screen and squint a bit. On the Asus monitor the center square is too dark, and the rightmost square is closest to the background. This three target test seems to me to be the more accurate way to determine monitor performance vs. examining a range of light to dark patches (which does help some).

All I have so far is a sample of one. Is the Asus monitor an unusually bad case, do other monitors when set to sRGB mode perform better, what about Apple computer monitors, how many visitors to photo websites set their monitor to sRGB viewing mode????

BTW,
Thanks for your tutorial on the double border, and I enjoyed looking at the photos of your site, some of those places I've been too.

Ken

Lille Ulven

You are welcome. Glad to hear you liked the tutorial I had and the photos too. I am still hoping to write some more tutorials in the near future...

As for the lightness of the photos, I am not super surprised if I am checking against cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/monitor-calibration.htm the middle square never reaches the same color as the border around it – and that despite the screen being calibrated. I do believe that I am on the right gamma value. Well...I guess I will re-calibrate and re-test. But photos on screen being too light also means they are probably good when printed at least so far I haven't had any trouble with the darkness of my prints, so that's good

After re-calibration and re-test: in Safari the middle box still looks to dark, but downloading the picture and looking at it in Preview and it looks correct. So which one to believe?
Also always remember: not every program supports the ICC profile of your screen and some browsers use sRGB no matter what.

Oh: for you to be able to post links you need a few more posts here. But you can always just post the link as plain text like so: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/monitor-calibration.htm

Also for monitors, I believe to remember that they are set deliberately "wrong" by the vendor, to a degree to show more vibrant colors in the store and then depending on what use they are meant for. So a office monitor which is meant to be mainly used for word processing will be set to a different light value than a monitor meant to be used for say gaming. The very best screens for graphic design and photography are still produced by Eizo – but I cannot afford them anyway – and these are to my knowledge the only ones which come with an inbuilt screen calibrator.

Just realizing that I need to recalibrate my screen as it possibly was calibrated with Nightshift off...so that might have changed a thing or two. Damn...400 photos to check...