Color/Monitor Question---???

[amy_bb]

I'm stil trying to develop a streamlined workflow for editing my sports pics. I have all the tools but am struggling to get a grip on LR3. I'll get there soon but for now, I still use the Microsoft Picture Viewer to upload and make first round deletions on my photos.

Since I do not currently do portrait work or print my photos on my printer, my monitor is not calibrated. I have a HP w2338h monitor if this is relevant to my forthcoming question.

When I pull up the pictures in Picture Viewer the colors are weirdly saturated and just plain off. The focus sometimes does not look sharp either.

When I pull up the same pictures in PS5 for final edits, the colors look normal and the pictures are much clearer.

I'm sure this has something to do w/the color scale/scheme differences btw. the monitor software and the Adobe software.

Can some explain to me how this is interpreted (in medium techie language if possible) and, if I can, how to adjust my monitor to line up the color interpretations?

TIA.

[mokka]

This may have more to do with colour space than monitor calibration. This is how devices that both record images and display or print images convert colours to numbers and back to colours. Essentially they are languages of colour, and different spaces display different colours differently and are limited to which colours they can display, the total list of all colours a space can display is called its gamut.

The industry standard for most digital uses is Adobe RGB (1998), other colour spaces exist to better replicate the results you will get from printing, to get the maximum gamut possible or even to simulate how things will look to someone who is colour-blind.

The most common colour spaces include in the name something like RGB, CMYK or Lab. These indicate how the colour is converted to numbers RGB means there will be three numbers representing the red, green and blue components of that colour, this is handy as your monitor is made up of red, green and blue pixel; though not all RGB colour spaces are alike. CYMK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, blacK and therefore needs 4 numbers to define each colour. This is how most printers produce colour. Lab is a bit more complicated, L is 'lightness' but 'a' and 'b' don't correspond to any properties of colours we would recognise, Lab has the largest gamut.

What you need to do is check that the colour space you are using is consistent throughout all the places you are using it. Lightroom, Photoshop, your camera, your monitor and the file itself (though Photoshop will warn you if the file you are opening uses a different colour space to the one it is set to use). All these things will have an option somewhere to alter the colour space. Your monitor's settings will be somewhere under display properties in the control panel. Settings|Advanced I think.

When it actually comes to monitors and printers, there are a lot of other things besides the colour space that affect how you see colour, from the quality of the inks in your printer to the settings on your monitor and even the angle, distance and incident lighting falling on your monitor. Printers are a particular problem as you can't have a printer using Adobe RGB due to the technical limitations of printing with ink, this is why most colour-spaces that exist are designed to replicate various printing processes, and why it is very difficult to achieve a perfect match between the colours on screen and the colours you print to. In practice, the only reliable way to ensure a good colour match is to make a print-out of a photo and then hold it up to your monitor and fiddle with the monitor settings (the buttons on the monitor, not the colour-space) until the monitor roughly matches the print-out.