Calibrated monitors

[Stu Bowie]

We all have different monitors, and Im sure if we are serious about our processing, we have calibrated our monitors with software that is available to do just that.

I often see comments where its stated that the whites are blown on a subject, while others say they look fine. Going one step further, how does one check in PS, if they are on the limit or not. Will it depend on your calibrated screen, or do you go further by using the following:

levels - holding down the alt key and holding the right hand slider
curves - ticking the show clipping box

Thanks,

Stuart.

[Robert Amoruso]

Stuart,

If your in PS and ACR turning on Highlight alerts will tell you if color(s) are clipped. Also in ACR holding down ALT and using recover, blacks or exposure will show clipping. I would presume similar in LR. Also as you mentioned in PS with levels and curves.

To me it is preferrable to deal with clipping at the time of conversion and not in PS.

[David Thomasson]

I often see comments where its stated that the whites are blown on a subject, while others say they look fine. Going one step further, how does one check in PS, if they are on the limit or not. Will it depend on your calibrated screen, or do you go further by using the following:

levels - holding down the alt key and holding the right hand slider
curves - ticking the show clipping box

It's a good idea to check for clipped highlights with levels or curves, as you describe. I also keep the expanded histogram on a function key so I can pop it out with one tap to see what's going on in an image. That's usually the first thing I do with any image. You can see at a glance whether there are any clipped highlights and which channels are clipped. Blue in this case. And if you are apt to overlook color casts, the histogram will usually show casts as well.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/7939/histo.jpg

[Axel Hildebrandt]

One of my assumptions is that many monitors are too bright and whites might look overexposed even if they are not. Good calibration software/hardware helps with that. If white plumage is not overexposed according to the histogram then you can adjust the brightness in a way that you see some texture/details in the whites. If you are on a Mac there is a Digital Color Meter. You can mouse over images and it gives you the RGB numbers. If there is a 255 then you know that colors are oversaturated or whites overexposed.

[Tell Dickinson]

One thing I have found is that some people will say the whites are blown when they actually are not blown but just lack detail on the screen because of the lighting, sometimes you can see white details in a print even when you cannot see them on screen.

Tell

[Desmond Chan]

One of my assumptions is that many monitors are too bright and whites might look overexposed even if they are not. Good calibration software/hardware helps with that.

When I calibrate my monitor, one of the steps is to adjust the brightness of the monitor. But how bright is bright is subjective and I think that leads to why one says "it's blown" while the other says "the whites are good" even though they are looking at the same whites. I personally use RGB values to decide if there're blown highlights or not.

[Roger Clark]

I have an article on LCD monitors and show how you can measure the screen brightness with your camera's light meter, and then set it to something reasonable. Most LCDs are shipped too bright.
See:
http://www.clarkvision.com/photoinfo/choosing_an_LCD_monitor

Roger

[Ben Egbert]

Exactly right. When I calibrate, I have many choices, like gamma, temperature and brightness. There is no universal calibration that I know of, we can calibrate to specific settings, but there are many setting we could choose.

I use d50, 80CD/mm^2 and native Gamma on my NEC monitor using Spectarview and a Monico. This provided perfect print match. But my web posts are often too bright for people using brighter monitors. Recently I have started using 120cd/mm^2 for web viewing.

I must process my images twice, once for web and once for prints.