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Correct contrast on screen
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.I recently bought a laptop and have been messing around with images, the problem I have is deciding what is the best way to judge the contrast of an image on screen. The image above is a scanned neg, ilford HP5, I made some slight adjustments and all seemed fine, then I moved my eye line and the image looked dull and flat, pretty much the way i’m loking at it now. So my question is, to all you guys who are well used to laptop screens, how can you be sure you have the correct level of brightness and contrast ???? Thanks in advance
very long and boring books have been written on this subject and the conclusion seems always to be that laptop screens are pants for critical colour and contrast control here’s a small bit of the mind numbing cr*p you’ll have to wade through
“The issues with laptop screens are these:
* 6bit panels which use electronic techniques to simulate an 8bit panel
* “TN” TFT LCD panels where gamma/color shifts at angles off center
* lack of hardware controls to adjust contrast and RGB (only a back light “brightness” control is typical)
* cheap CCFL back lights that don’t cover the full sRGB color space
* flakey OEM “screen mode” software that is no where near a calibrated sRGB standard
For this reason most people that are serious about accurate color work using Photoshop or other editing software, will elect to use an external monitor with their laptops.
With the external they they can obtain a monitor with 8 or 10bit panels; 8, 10, 12, or 14 bit processing of the image; full coverage of the sRGB color space and/or AdobeRGB space (wide gamut); an IPS or PVA TFT panel that has minimal issues with gamma/color shifts at off angle viewing; and a full suite of hardware controls for use in calibrating”Look into a huey or spyder for calibration, I think one of the sponsors here on the site sells them.
Thanks, Dermot. Now, I’ll need to sit down and rest for an hour.
For what it’s worth, I have a Dell with a very good laptop screen – certainly better than a cheap monitor.
Dedalus – on my laptop screen, your image looks very good, with great definition of (and between) the various shades – something that many b&w images seem to lack.
Thanks, Dermot. Now, I’ll need to sit down and rest for an hour.
For what it’s worth, I have a Dell with a very good laptop screen – certainly better than a cheap monitor.
Dedalus – on my laptop screen, your image looks very good, with great definition of (and between) the various shades – something that many b&w images seem to lack.
I’ve held on to my old monitor so maybe I’ll look at the image on that, the only thing that worries me really is if viewing an imge on the latop how can I be sure what I’m doing to it is correct,I mean all it takes is to move my eyeline either up or down and the image changes (and not for the better)
Dedalus, If you can change the percieved contrast on the laptop monitor by moving your head up and down (i.e. eyeline up and down), then you have a TN monitor, which is the cheap type, as mentioned by Dermot.
You can get around this by finding someone with a good monitor (S-IPS, PVA etc), then put them side by side, and tilt your laptop monitor until they look the same. Make note of the angle, and ensure you always view your laptop screen at this angle when you’re processing and viewing images.By the way, what’s the model number of your laptop?
Rgds,
Dave.
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