Monitor Calibration/Colors Being Off

[Fattymoocow]

Hi everyone (sorry for the long post),

I'm kind of in a slump right now because I've been doing some photo editing to some of my Thanksgiving photos and I've spent about a day's worth of time editing with results of what I initially thought were pretty decent (beginner photographer/photo editor). I am working off of Photoshop Elements. I just bought this as I thought it would be a great first step to really get me into a lot of the basic offerings of Photoshop but without the overwhelming feeling I know I would have felt had I just jumped right into Photoshop.

Anyways, I've spent the entire day editing my photos and at the end of it all I was pretty content with how my photos turned out after editing. I uploaded some of the pictures to my personal blog and to my Facebook profile to share with my family members. I work off of a Dell XPS laptop and for some reason the concept of calibrating monitors came back to me and it made me think, to check out my photos from my bf's Macbook Pro just to see how my photos looked on someone else's computer. I checked out my photos from his computer and found that my photos looked really different!!

I was pretty shocked at how different my colors and hues looked on his computer. From my computer screen and what I saw, I was pretty happy with. When I checked it out on his, I was really really disappointed and was kind of embarrassed that I even uploaded the photos to FB to share. Some pictures that I had uploaded, I had thought that I had taken out yellow hues from my light sources and my colors looked pretty balanced from my computer. On my bf's Apple, a lot of my pictures showed yellow tinting, oversaturation, and really blown out colors.

I'm feeling really kind of defeated right now because all my efforts with photo editing feels like it was for nothing since what I'm seeing isn't what I assume someone else is seeing. And what I'm sharing with my friends/family are maybe actually really bad photos that I'm kind of embarrassed about now. Can anyone give me some advice as to how to compensate for this issue? I really don't have money to buy a desktop because I know you shouldn't really do photo editing on laptops but I didn't realize my colors were that far off until today. I knew there would be some variances but I didn't know that the variances in colors were really that far off.

Can anyone give me some advice as to how to handle this? What should I do for any future photo edits? I kind of feel like if I have to play with colors that it won't even be worth it because I'm not really seeing anything near true to what someone else might see?

Here's just one example of a photo that shows absolutely no yellow hues on my laptop monitor but I see really apparent yellow hues on a Macbook Pro. I wanted to use this as an example because it has a simpler problem since most apparent issue between my laptop and another laptop was just the yellow tinting.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr....JdjeZM2vbrM%3D

Please help.

[katia]

so get an external monitor.

[Joshua Quain]

Originally Posted by Fattymoocow

Hi everyone (sorry for the long post),

I'm kind of in a slump right now because I've been doing some photo editing to some of my Thanksgiving photos and I've spent about a day's worth of time editing with results of what I initially thought were pretty decent (beginner photographer/photo editor). I am working off of Photoshop Elements. I just bought this as I thought it would be a great first step to really get me into a lot of the basic offerings of Photoshop but without the overwhelming feeling I know I would have felt had I just jumped right into Photoshop.

Anyways, I've spent the entire day editing my photos and at the end of it all I was pretty content with how my photos turned out after editing. I uploaded some of the pictures to my personal blog and to my Facebook profile to share with my family members. I work off of a Dell XPS laptop and for some reason the concept of calibrating monitors came back to me and it made me think, to check out my photos from my bf's Macbook Pro just to see how my photos looked on someone else's computer. I checked out my photos from his computer and found that my photos looked really different!!

I was pretty shocked at how different my colors and hues looked on his computer. From my computer screen and what I saw, I was pretty happy with. When I checked it out on his, I was really really disappointed and was kind of embarrassed that I even uploaded the photos to FB to share. Some pictures that I had uploaded, I had thought that I had taken out yellow hues from my light sources and my colors looked pretty balanced from my computer. On my bf's Apple, a lot of my pictures showed yellow tinting, oversaturation, and really blown out colors.

I'm feeling really kind of defeated right now because all my efforts with photo editing feels like it was for nothing since what I'm seeing isn't what I assume someone else is seeing. And what I'm sharing with my friends/family are maybe actually really bad photos that I'm kind of embarrassed about now. Can anyone give me some advice as to how to compensate for this issue? I really don't have money to buy a desktop because I know you shouldn't really do photo editing on laptops but I didn't realize my colors were that far off until today. I knew there would be some variances but I didn't know that the variances in colors were really that far off.

Can anyone give me some advice as to how to handle this? What should I do for any future photo edits? I kind of feel like if I have to play with colors that it won't even be worth it because I'm not really seeing anything near true to what someone else might see?

Here's just one example of a photo that shows absolutely no yellow hues on my laptop monitor but I see really apparent yellow hues on a Macbook Pro. I wanted to use this as an example because it has a simpler problem since most apparent issue between my laptop and another laptop was just the yellow tinting.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr....JdjeZM2vbrM%3D

Please help.

This is a common problem. The only way to solve this is to calibrate and adjust the displays settings (color temperature/white point, back-light, RGB levels, gamma, etc.) to the proper settings and then create and upload a corrective ICC profile. unfortunately, comparing your images on your Dell XPS to your friends Macbook Pro will not help as the Macbook Pro is most likely not calibrated either. The calibration controls that come with the Macbook Pro are very limited and extremely subjective. The ideal way to calibrate a screen to get the proper representation of your photo's is by measuring the display with a tristimulus colorimeter or spectroradiometer and making adjustments to correct for improper color.

I hope this helps.