Post-editing på LCD?

[sentence]

Jeg har en sånn middels grei Samsung LCD-skjerm (2232BW) som faktisk har gode farger og er skarp som bare det. Ikke så værst kontrast heller. Men er dette noe å bruke til seriøst etterbehandling? Jeg merker etter å ha editert noen bilder at når jeg går over til en plasma-TV for å se "lysbildeshow" så blir ting litt annerledes. Så hva mener dere, og hvordan kan man kalibrere en slik LCD best mulig før editering? Eller bør jeg bare kaste hele reia og kjøpe noe bedre?

[IceFox]

Hjelper pent lite med verdens beste skjerm hvis den ikke er kalibrert. En Spyder3 burde gjøre susen.

[sn0dig]

Så må man huske på dette: bilder som blir redigert på gode kalibrerte skjermer vil ofte se dritt ut på ukalibrerte dårlige skjermer, som "folk flest" har i hjemmet sitt. Plasma-TVen er nok ikke kalibrert, så da er du like langt.

[IceFox]

Det stemmer selvfølgelig. Men da er i hvertfall kun én skjerm ukalibrert. Men hva legger du i seriøs etterbehandling?

[sentence]

Det stemmer selvfølgelig. Men da er i hvertfall kun én skjerm ukalibrert. Men hva legger du i seriøs etterbehandling?

 

Seriøst og seriøst, fru blom. Ikke at jeg skal ha en kunstutstilling eller noe. Men at man tar noen fine naturbilder og vil at de skal fremstå så bra som mulig for allmenheten.

[sentence]

Jeg satt i dag tidlig på jobben og fant en liten artikkel som handler om etterbehandling på datamaskin og LCD-skjermer. Jeg vet ikke hvor troverdig den er, men den virker ganske gjennomført og stemmer overens med et par andre kilder jeg også fant.

 

Den er på engelsk, men jeg regner med at de fleste her inne har kommet seg igjennom grunnskaolen. Og den er egentlig mye lengre, så jeg klippet bare ut det relevante.

 

Display monitor calibration is something that more or less belongs to the past and especially to old analogue CRT monitors. A decent equivalence to this concept is what’s going on in sound productions as in music and films. Those guys are using something that’s called Studio Monitor Speakers. Those are expensive speakers that you really don’t want to have for home use, since they have a very flat and dull sound. But the sound is flat and dull for a good reason; they’re perfectly neutralized – more expensive, more neutralized - without any frequency peaks. When they produce music and film sounds on such monitors, the eventual sound will sound at its best on all the different speakers in the world. Let’s say that they produced a music track on none-neutralized monitors with a very weak bass resonance, and therefore cranked up the bass to compensate, the bass would’ve been unbearable on speakers with a natural strong bass resonance, as in too much.

 

Now let’s go back to display monitors. Let’s see if you’re post-treating a raw image from a digital camera or scanner, and doing so on a bad monitor that has by nature cool temperature colours - as in bluish - and then you of course adjusts the colour balance to warmer the colours, right? Then again, another person on the other side of the globe is watching your images with an equal bad monitor, but his one is the opposite: natural warm. Logically, when he watches your image, it will be painfully warm, as in too redish, amber or whatever.

 

What you want to have when you’re doing serious post-treatment on raw images is a monitor that is as neutral as possible. That is what monitor calibration is all about; making the monitor’s colours neutral. And there’s several ways to do that: If you have a really good printer, you can download a ‘perfect picture’ from the web, print it out, and place it right at the side of your monitor and start tweaking the RGB channels. Another way is to buy expensive equipment with software that does it all for you. But all that this equipment really does is neutralizing your monitor, something that was really crucial in the past on old analogue CRT monitors with horrific colour balance; when white often tipped over into red, green or blue; and when green easily tipped over into brown, red into amber, and etcetera. But – and here comes a big one – almost every single midrange to pro LCD monitor since the last five years, especially those using a digital signal source as DVI, is more or less perfectly neutralized right from the fabric! Black is black, or at least as black as the white-to-black contrast level allows. White is in almost every occasions completely white. Red, green and blue are in almost every occasion completely red, green and blue, LCD screens having the most energetic RGB colours compared to CRT.

 

So, isn’t this good enough? For the default home/office user, it is! You may be tempted to buy expensive equipment to neutralize your monitor, but you’ll save a lot of money if you just press the ‘restore to fabric’ button on your less than five year old midrange TN+FILM LCD monitor. The difference between these two methods is so slight that most people can’t even notice the colour difference by glance. Of course, you’ll need to make sure to do the following after the fabric restore:

 

Make sure the RGB channels are neutralized to equal 50/50/50 in percent ratio. Then your RGB colour balance is as neutralized as your monitor can deliver.

Some LCD monitors have a contrast slider. This slider doesn’t really increase the true contrast – black to white – it fakes it to what’s better known as Dynamic Contrast. So you’ll want to set it as close to zero as possible even though it loses its ‘cheerfulness’. As said before, you will want it to be neutral, not cheerful!

The brightness slider is also important to check: Too bright burns out the weak colours. Too dark may weaken its true contrast. You will want to have it as neutral as possible, in other words: as close to 50 percent as possible.

Turn off all the Magic/Super/Superb/Turbo Colour modes and assistances.

Don’t add optional colour optimizer software. If you have any installed, remove them and just use the default colour scheme in your OS. That one will not manipulate your colours.

 

Now, your monitor is neutralized and you’ve just saved a tiny fortune.

 

Are consumer grade LCD monitors enough for you? As been said before: for default home/office use, they are! Post-treating raw images from digital cameras or canners, either it’s your family pictures, nature, or even some semi-professional art projects, it is good enough. The only thing you really gain on more expensive monitors, like the IPS panels or anything better than the mainstream TN+FILM, is a bit better true contrast ratio and a bit more accurate colours. Though, on the more expensive or professional grade LCD monitors, you’ll get simple calibration equipment bundled. But still, the manual neutralising on a modern LCD is enough for the layman.

 

The only thing to be concerned about during post-treatment on the cheapest consumer monitors around, is its lack of true contrast. You will want to be as close to 1000:1 true contrast as possible, something you’ll get on the midrange models - or even better if you can afford it. But the bottom lines are:

 

Midrange consumer grade TN+FILM LCD monitors are good enough.

Expensive calibration software for LCD monitors is all-in-all a waste of money. Even though they give the most accurate settings for your monitor, that setting is just next to the default fabric monitor setting!

 

When you operate in poor contrast environments, just keep that in mind when you post-treating your images. In other words: be careful with the contrast adjustment in your graphics software. Since plasma televisions have much better real contrast levels than LCD, you can double check on them – if you’re able to - to see if you’ve overdone it. Best of all, print out a sample on a midrange inc photo printer to see. At least, also keep in mind that 95% of all the default computer users are using midrange consumer LCD monitors more or less neutralized. If you post-process your images on such a monitor, after neutralized it as explained above, your images will look good on mostly all other systems even though they’ve tweaked theirs.

Hva mener dere om dette? For meg høres det veldig lovende ut.

[TheBoxhead]

Veldig interessant, den motsier vertfall hva endel andre personer her på forumet har ment

 

Men jeg er egentelig med på logikken. Problemet er at jeg mangler nok erfaring til å si meg enig. Men min erfaring så langt så tipper jeg mot den samme konklusjonen, altså at å bruke tusenvis av penger på å kalibrere en skjerm ikke gjør store forskjellen. Dette kommer jo ann på bruken også. Hvis bildene dine mest spres digitalt er det god logikk i at bildene vises så riktig som mulig på den "gjengse monitor" som ola dunk sitter med.

 

Det eneste problemet jeg kan se er at jeg fortsatt har endel avvik på hva jeg ser på min LCD skjerm og hva jeg ser når jeg har printet ut bildet mitt. Jeg har derfor manuelt justert min skjerm slik at den ligner bildene jeg skriver ut mest mulig.

[erty_]

Jeg satt i dag tidlig på jobben og fant en liten artikkel som handler om etterbehandling på datamaskin og LCD-skjermer. Jeg vet ikke hvor troverdig den er, men den virker ganske gjennomført og stemmer overens med et par andre kilder jeg også fant.

 

Det er nok heilt rett at dei fleste LCD-skjermar i dag er betre enn dei gamle CRT-skjermane med tanke på riktige fargar. Likevel må ein kalibrere skjermen jevnleg, for å kunne vere sikker på at det ein ser på skjermen er korrekt.

 

Eg veit at min skjerm (Bærbar Dell Inspiron 6400, 2 år gammal) i utgangspunktet har eit ganske kraftig blåstikk, noko som vert retta opp med kalibrering. Blåstikket var eg ikkje klar over på førehand, men utfallet av det er at alle bileta som vert redigert/tilpassa på den skjermen vil bli for varme både på ein kalibrert skjerm (feks. web-vising), og ein kalibrert skrivar. Ein kan då forverre fargane for eit, i utgangspunktet, perfekt opptak.

 

Dersom ein ikkje kalibrerer skjermen, vil ein aldri kunne få kontroll på korleis det eksportert biletet vil sjå ut, anten ved web-vising eller print.

Endret 27. oktober 2008 av erty_

[sentence]

Det er nok ikke dumt å kalibrere skjermen hvis man vil ha det helt perfekt. Noen skjermer er også dårligere enn andre og er kanskje mer avhengige av kalibrering. Men om det strengt talt er nødvendig blir jo en annen sak, dersom man har en god LCD-skjerm som har helt nøytrale R/G/B-instillinger og lys/kontrast, osv. Så kan man jo kontrollere med en fotoskriver og glossy ark om bildene blir som ønsket.