Saturation

[Dumien]

So guys, I have a question about saturation, as the title of the post might have hinted. When I sort of calibrated my laptop monitor (which means using one of these http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/ websites to do so) everything became more de-saturated. That was because I set the option called Digital Brightness in my settings to zero. If it matters, I have NVIDIA hardware. No problem so far.


Today I went down at the lake to take near my city to take some pictures, and, since they looked de-saturated to me, I added some in order for me to see them as I like on the screen. Later in the day I showed them to my mom on a LG plasma TV -I did so by putting images on a pen drive which then was placed in my Xbox which made the displaying on the TV. They looked horrendously saturated. The rooftops were tinted of a very unrealistic red, for example, and the greens were just glowing. I understand it was most likely because of the saturation settings on the TV.


but my question is: when I will print those pictures, will they look more like what's displayed on my monitor or on the TV? Would the calibration of the printers of the lab be more similar to my computer screen's images or would it be more similar to the one of the TV?


(If it matters, the TV has a contrast ratio of 1million to 1. For what I read this is the standard for judging image quality on a TV... and the "Image style" setting was on "standard")


thank you for your time and patience,


Andy


ps: if you want me to post one of the images, no problem, just ask =)


[edited to add the end of a sentence..XD]

[Joel Bookhammer]

Andy if you could post one it would be great, I dont have answers to your question, but I do sorta have the same question as you.


thanks


joel

[Dumien]

Here you go...this is the one of the unrealistic rooftops I talked about in the original post =)

[Daniel Browning]

but my question is: when I will print those pictures, will they look more like what's displayed on my monitor or on the TV?

It will look nothing like either of them, but my *guess* is that it will be more similar to the laptop. Just like an orange is more similar to an apple than a fish, but it's still apples and oranges.

Would the calibration of the printers of the lab be more similar to my computer screen's images or would it be more similar to the one of the TV?

If the TV were 8-bit and your laptop is 6-bit, then it may be possible to calibrate the TV to a closer proximitity, depending on the connectivity (DVI, HDMI, etc.). But neither will be very close to the print.


Even a $1000-$3000 professional studio monitors cannot really show you what a print will look like, but they can do a lot better than 99% of laptops.

[Dumien]

I see...so basically what I should do is do my processing, send it for printing and then hope for the best?

[Colin]

Or maybeget a printer, calibrate it, and then proof with that.


My calibrated CRT and calibrated printer don't look WAY off. The overall balance and such is fine so that I'm not getting any whacky surprises, at least nothing like you're describing.


I find that I when printing, I tend to want to bias it a little brighter and keep the absolute contrast a little down to keep some detail in highlights and shadows, but otherwise, I'm not heavily disappointed, though at times I might want to make an adjustment and rip off another copy.


Thing about prints, though, is that they're heavily dependent upon the light you're viewing them with [] I've got some prints that look okay in my house, but much nicer if you bring them out into some nice full spectrum sunlight. I suppose you could get some full spectrum fixtures too, but I'm cheap at the moment.