Just curious, what do you guys do to ensure pictures look good at various monitor settings? I was looking at some pics I took on a few work monitors, and I didn't like how they looked. I have two 24" double LCD's at home, and adjust pics accordingly. Any tips to keep things consistent looking? thanx

 

how can you? I didn't know you could control that. besides going over to the persons house and calibrating their monitor.

 

Someone recommended using Pantone Huey to help calibrate pics. Anyone have this software?

 

Synth, skim through the "Need a Monitor, any suggestions?" thread. There's mentions of the Pantone Huey as well as the (more expensive) alternatives in there. If you want to get some idea of how these things work, just do a search on Youtube for monitor calibration. There seems to be many videos that will show you the basics.

 

I need to do this, too.

Just keep in mind that monitor calibration is mainly so that your prints will match what you see on your calibrated screen. There's really nothing you can do to make sure it looks "right" on anyone else's monitor.

 

Can't control others' screens; but I can control mine and prints. I use the Spyder2 Express (doesn't support dual screen calibration though):

http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-mc-s2e.php

 

You really can't. Although, you can calibrate your screen, like what the others have said. This will at at least put you in a standard at all times. It will look good on calibrated screens and may look good on non-calibrated screens. It' least your prints will come out correctly.

 

A few things:
1) Make sure you save pictures as sRGB, if they are later viewed on the web.
2) Make sure to look at photos with a non-calibration aware program, such as say a web browser. You might have noticed that photos look totally different on say, photoshop (calibration aware) and IE. The latter is more of what others will see.

3) Another big difference may be lighting - the lighting in the office is far brighter than my home, so I have a tendency to, at home, make pictures 'brighter' than normal, so that they don't look dark in the office.

Besides that, you have very little control. If someone looks at your pictures on a crap monitor, it'll look like crap. If they have a glare guard over their monitor, it'l look ultra dark. etc, etc.

All you can realistically do is calibrate at home, which is as good as the color can get. Those who care about pictures will calibrate or at least have a good enough monitor that it'll be close. Those who don't care won't notice any differences anyway.

- Frank