Monitor brightness w/PhotoCal

My Dell monitor was not able to achieve Photocal's suggested luminence range of 85 - 95. As a result, I set the brightness based on NPN's tonal bar and the appearance of E.J. Peiker's posts (figuring EJ would have his monitor set correctly! ). My new Viewsonic easily achieves the 85 - 95 range, but with the result that many posted photos on NSN, including especially my last post (the Eagle), look very dark and very saturated (even to my taste!). For other PhotoCal users, do you stay within the 85 - 95 range, and do photos posted on NPN look right with a monitor so adjusted? If you don't stay with the suggested range, how do you set the brightness and contrast of your monitor?

I use the suggested range and I do get comments on the images being too dark sometimes. I guess thats the problem, if everyone were calibrated the same way and we would then all adjust our images to look right to the same standard and they would look fine to everyone. Unfortunately until monitor calibration is a part of the OS, its not going to happen.

Hold the phone. Something doesn't make sense here. If Cliff is saying that his images now look too dark at the proper luminance setting wouldn't he tend to make them lighter to view properly on his monitor. If you are doing the same thing, E.J., wouldn't you get comments that your images look too light if you are adjusting them to look correct on your monitor?

I'm confused...

I haven't used PhotoCal on my current LCD because I haven't sprung for the LCD version yet. I can't remember what I had with the CRT.

Greg, what I meant was that different people are going to see things as too dark while others see them as too light as long as we all aren't calibrating to the same standard.

EJ is on a Mac and he has calibrated his monitor for 5000K, where cliff is on a PC and he should be at 6500K. The 85 to 95 range will be considerably different between the two. When I look at EJ's Anhinga image it looks perfect and when I look at Cliff's eagle image it does look a little dark. I am using a Sony Artisan calibrated at 6500 K. This leads me to belive that Cliff is probaly calibrating at 5000K which will be very difficult to get to the 85-95 range for accuracy for Optical on a PC.

Sorry, I would get fired from my day job if I used a Mac

I do agree though that the monitor needs to be set to 6500 if possible.

E.J. is using a PC....with a Samsung monitor.

I get it E.J., for some reason I read your post as meaning that your monitor comes up a bit dark, like Cliff's, but that is not what you meant to imply. My mistake. I agree it is never apples to apples with monitor calibrations.

EJ
I was just guessing, I'll send a letter of apology to your day job.

Hey Cliff, where in the PhotoCal procedure did your monitor fail to reach the luminance value? In PhotoCal, you do several steps (order approximate):

1 pick a Kelvin value, such as 6500K
2 set contrast to 100%
3 adjust brightness using those black and gray rectangles
4 then measure luminance, with a target of 85 - 95, and adjust contrast to get in the right range
5 then calibrate color; if you have color controls, you set the RGB guns individually to balance them, but to sum to a luminance of 85 - 95

Did you fail to reach the luminance range at step 4 or 5?

If you can't get to the range in step four, you are out of luck if contrast is already at 100%. But if you adjusted contrast down and luminance drops below 85 in step 5, you can boost contrast to get the luminance back up.

MartyC wrote:EJ is on a Mac

Say what??

Thanks, all, for your responses. I mispoke when I said I can't get my Dell to a luminence of 85 - 95. (Hadn't PhotoCal'd the Dell lately, as it has always seemed quite stable). I can, in fact, get within that range, though I can see why I didn't want to. Every image on the first page of the Avian forum looks dull and dingy (at least my Eagle looks no worse than the others, though I can't see the detail inside the mouth as I could before). Sunlit photos look overcast. Very depressing. Is this the way everyone else is seeing pictures? If most people are profiled using PhotoCal, shouldn't their images look "right" now that I'm within PhotoCal's range?

There is at least one exception. EJ's current post, the Anhinga, looks dark and muddy, like the others. But his Merganser (two posts back), which looked slightly hot to me originally, now looks perfect.

Thinking back, this is what happened when I first got PhotoCal. I had previously set brightness and contrast using NPN's tonal bar and by looking at a wide range of posted images. I was convinced my monitor was too dark at 85 - 95 in part because EJ's posts looked too dark, so I went back to the tonal bar. (Sorry, EJ, not stalking you--just figure an Intel guy is more likely to have it right.)

By the way, the luminence on the Dell was 153, so 93 is a huge change. It's like being in a cave. If I now go back and redo the Eagle to make it look on my monitor as it does on the light table, will it look too bright to everyone else? Have my posts looked too bright in the past?

Off subject a bit, but this kind of thing is an enormous hurdle, I think, for digital. Remember the NG story on military aircraft done completely with digital? The magazine furnished the photographer and the editor with high-end, matching monitors. Seemed silly (and obviously impractical for most of us), but now I can see why they did it. Do we have a clue, when we do a digital submission, how it looks on the editor's monitor?

Strange Brew Cliff! I think your Eagle looks great on my Photocalled monitors! Something seems way off. One time I did a monitor calibration and didn't have the sensor properly touching the screen, there was a bit of a light leak and everything looked horrible when done - that's especially easy to do on an LCD. I have found the best way to cal an LCD monitor is in a dark room with the LCD laying flat and the spyder sitting on the screen horizontally. Also make sure that the LCD attachment is on your spyder.

EJ,

Actually, I don't own an LCD. Nor do I think I'm using the Spyder incorrectly (it's pretty easy to follow the instructions!). I adjusted the Dell to a luminence of 95 this morning, and now it and the Viewsonic look very much alike--dark. Guess the next step is to process an image on a dark monitor and see if it blinds everyone when I post it.

Something is odd, indeed. I looked at EJ's anhinga (superb picture, great composition) and it looked great on my crummy work monitor, which tends to make images look dark. I didn't see any blacked out dark areas, and the contrast and midtones looked great.