Over the last few months I have been building my portfolio, trying various techniques and photographing different subjects (http://alecrain.redbubble.com/), photos that I was especially proud of I put here on Redbubble (and Flicr) to get some comments and even perhaps to sell few of them.
At one point I even decided to print one or two of the photos on my home printer that was always good to me but to my frustration I could never get it to print the photos I processed correctly.
I always shoot in RAW and then process the photos to my liking, however photos that looked great on my screen (default screen settings for my Toshiba P300 laptop) don’t look so good on the prints- they are way underexposed and HUE and Saturation are off.
I decided to calibrate my screen using one (and then many) of the calibration photos I found online.
I printed one using default printer settings and then holding the print next to my screen I tried to adjust contrast, gamma, hue, saturation to my screen best represent the actual print.
Finally after few hours I was happy with the result, I confirmed that all was good by trying other calibration images and good quality photos from National Geographic and so on. All was good
But then I rechecked my own photos, to my terror most of them were really bad, nothing what I worked so hard on achieving.
………..
:-(
Lenny La Rue, IPA
This is just brutal. Fortunately, you are a fan of RAW shooting so you can easily go back and redo the originals but the sense of loss has to be horrific. I feel you you but wish you the best with your “new” pieces, as they will all jump out at you as new once you get started. And filter in a few actual new pieces of work and the task won’t seem like you’ve put your entire creativity on hold until the clean-up is finished. Before I knew what RAW was, I saved to TIFF and _deleted _ the originals without even saving file numbers. You are lightyears away from something THAT unforgivable and unreplaceable.
Forgive yourself and then bless yourself for having the foresight to make the originals lossless. :-)
Arek Rainczuk:
Thanks, I still have the original RAW files so I can redo them if I need to.
By the way, how do my photos look on your screen?
Lenny La Rue, IPA
On MY screens (all three of them) they look fine. Uh oh. LOL! Nah, I calibrate my screens on the 1st of the month and like a smoke detector, that’s a good way to make sure you’re not dead. :-D
Geraldine Lefoe
Yep can relate to this Arek – when i first calibrated discovered my images were over saturated and looked awful. Finally invested in a decent screen – something to do when you’re finished writing up!
Arek Rainczuk:
I invested in Huey, now my screen is colour calibrated, but since it’s a LCD on a laptop the brightness and contrast changes depending on the angle….
Well, it’s better then nothing.
By the way, how do my photos look on your screen?