I have an ongoing problem of knowing what my pictures look like. Between the two handheld devices and the two PC monitors I have, all the pictures look slightly different. Here's the same pic on both my monitors for comparison.
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As you can see the one on the left looks more contrasty and the right has a blue tint. My phone and tablet show something slightly different again.
This was really driven home to me on a zoom call this week with my "real camera" mate who said she thought the pics I was showing her could do with more contrast. That's when it occured to me her monitor would be set sightly differently to mine so she wouldn't see it quite the same anyway.
So has anyone beaten a trail down this issue before that can give me tips or ideas?
What do I need to consider regarding my monitors and screens?
Should I invest in better monitors? (my oldest monitor is at least 15 years old I'd guess)
Any resources that you can point at me welcome of course.
Here's a before and after "Needs more contrast" example.
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I do think the more contraty pic works better on reflection.
Aiee. It's a nightmare.
I think the essence of the problem is that there's inevitable variation in how different brands and models of screens display colors and tones (and what their native white point is), there's sample variation within any given brand and model, and there's further variation in how users set up their individual systems as far as brightness, contrast, color, and so on are concerned. Plus monitor colors can shift as the screens age. So there is not, as far as I know, any way to be sure that someone viewing your image is seeing the same thing that you do.
Because I do a fair amount of printing, I do have a "color-managed workflow" for that, which means that I have created ICC color profiles for my laptop screen and my external screen, as well as ICC color profiles for each combination of paper and printer that I want to use. The result is that I can get a fairly good match -- not perfect -- between what I see on the screen and what comes out of the printer.
As yet, there's no color management of that sort available for iOS devices (and I'd guess for Android either, though I could be wrong). So there's no way to match up the screens of my mobile devices with the screens of my computers, much less with the screens of people out in the world viewing my stuff.
Also, because an inkjet print (reflected light) is never going to be as bright, saturated, and contrasty as a monitor screen (transmissive light), the color-managed workflow for printing leaves you (or rather, me) with a display that is set to be less bright and contrasty than the same screen run without a color profile. So for me, it's very difficult to look at an image on my iPad and imagine how it will look as a print. Experience helps a little. But this part is only a problem if you're fairly seriously involved in printing.
You could, conceivably, configure all your own screens to be within speaking distance of each other. Reducing the brightness of mobile device displays may help to match desktop displays.
And X-Rite has an iOS app called ColorTrue that makes it possible to create a color profile for an iOS device, but that profile can only be used in the app, which can only display images, not edit them in any way. I don't know if there's anything similar for Android. (The ColorTrue app requires some X-Rite hardware, a colorimeter, to create the profile. I bought one a long time back, but it's also possible to rent them.)
But even if you get all your own screens showing you similar renderings, you still have no knowledge of or control over how they will appear on screens around the world. If there were a color-managed web, with color profiles for web sites that browsers could read, then we might get somewhere, but that's only a fantasy so far.
My own compromise, so far, is to use the display on my iPad as my checkpoint for images I'm going to upload and to run that iPad at full brightness, guessing that that's what most viewers will be doing (not using an iPad, I mean, but viewing on a mobile device with default settings).
I also decided, some time back, to downsize my pix to 1500 pixels on the long side before uploading to MobiTog, rather than allowing MobiTog to do the resizing for me. I started doing that because I noticed that downsizing (wherever it's done) sometimes changes the look of an image. Even so, I'm sometimes disappointed with how an image looks on MobiTog after I post it and may go into a mild frenzy of tweaking to make it look better.
I'd dearly love to learn that there are better options available now, but I haven't heard of any.
