Monitor Calibration

[Kayaker72]

First off...thanks and very glad that you like the photos. Those scenes where so great, I just hope to do them justice. I am also glad to hear that my monitor is likely dialed in.

I have seen interviews with a number of famous photographers who only shoot in Black & White, is this because of the eye sight?

Is it our monitors or is it us? So how many of us have a slight problem with colour vision? Now that I understand that I have a sight colour vision problem I now realise that I cannot trust my vision, so I must trust the tools.

As for the colour blindness most males do lose some of the green brown differentiation over the years. Mine remains slight. Noticed during assesment for working with lasers in the labs.

It is a very interesting concept, that many personality traits may not be simply peoples opinion, but rather peoples opinions, personality and different characteristics may be, in part, due to how they are biologically/physically set up to differently perceive and interact with the same physical world.

So, I agree, each of us may physically "see," perceive and interact with colors differently. I've come to expect it. Of course, really the goal of calibration is to best insure that the output observed on my screen is consistent to what is being displayed on other monitors and when printed. Calibration won't fix how I personally interpret and manipulate the image.

BTW, working in the hazardous waste industry, I am tested annually for things such as color blindness. So far, no issues.

Did you use the eyedropper to set white balance, or did you adjust it entirely on how it looked on the monitor? I tried importing a couple of your jpegs into Lightroom, and then used the white balance eyedropper on the water. Lightroom made Image 8910 a bit warmer, and 8937 a bit cooler, in order to achieve neutral balance. I use the eyedropper with a lot of images, and then decide which version I really like... the camera's auto white balance version, or Lightroom's eyedropper-neutral version. More often than not I end up manually adjusting the sliders to something halfway in between. But with the calibrated monitor you'll certainly have more confidence that what you see is what you'll get when you print, and what others should see if they also have calibrated monitors.

I do a little of all three as well. I tend to start with the dropper on the waterfall. But I also look at the settings for "as shot" and the LR "auto." Amazes me how different those three can be. So then I pick one as a starting point and make adjustments until it is the most pleasing to me. Thus, my monitor plays a critical role in where those images end up.

Part of what is going on is that I've gone back to look at several photos processed in the last few years and some of them now strike me as having too much magenta. It is a bit odd, but most are actually ok, IMO. So there seems to be some sort of tipping point where maybe I had processed an image with an acceptable but high amount of magenta before and now, after calibrating the monitor, it appears to be too much.

Again, thanks for the feedback...