Monitor Calibration

[Paul Lagasi]

I recently bought a new monitor because I was not happy with old monitor. My question is:

When I view my photos with Capture NX the photos are great looking (colors and exposure) but when I look at the same photo with Picture Viewer or Photoshop CS they look nothing like photos with NX. They look like they are all overexposed.

I think this is why most comments about my photos I post are that they are too dark. I used to generally darken my photos with Photoshop to make them look right to me, now I am not sure which to use Photshop or Capture NX.

How do I make them both the same...I tried changing some of the gamma setting but nothing seems to work.

Paul

[Alfred Forns]

Paul is all is calibrated there will be no differences.

Would go to PS and check preferences. Make sure all color spaces are set properly. It is always a good idea to use one of the commercial products to calibrate the monitor. btw for quick reference notice the grayscale at the bottom of the page. If you can see all the squares clearly you are in the ballpark.

[Bob Steer]

I would agree with calibrating your monitor. It is very easy to do and just requires a $200 investment in a colorimeter. I personally like the eye-one display 2 since you can place it anywhere on your monitor and it will find its location. This is useful since when it get down to making RGB adjustments with you monitor menu if you have the colorimeter in the center of the screen it is constantly covering your menu and interferes with the measurement.

If you get further into color management and plan to print your own images you can get into spectrophotometers to create printer/paper profiles but that gets more complicated and expensive. I would start by simply calibrating your monitor.

Hope this helps

Bob