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insha · Mar 28, 2004, 11:21 PM

Hi all,

I am using TiBook with Panther and using iPhoto. I have tons of pictures that I took with my digital Camera (Nikon CoolPix). These pictures look perfect when I am looking at them on the digital camera and on my TiBook. However when I upload them to my web site and view them on a PC; The same pictures look very dark.

Is there something I can do to fix this problem (short of not viewing them on the PC)?

Thanks.

art_director · Mar 29, 2004, 09:07 AM

Originally posted by insha:
Hi all,

I am using TiBook with Panther and using iPhoto. I have tons of pictures that I took with my digital Camera (Nikon CoolPix). These pictures look perfect when I am looking at them on the digital camera and on my TiBook. However when I upload them to my web site and view them on a PC; The same pictures look very dark.

Is there something I can do to fix this problem (short of not viewing them on the PC)?

Thanks.

buy a new monitor for the pc.

velodev · Mar 29, 2004, 09:43 AM

Originally posted by art_director:
buy a new monitor for the pc.

You don't need a new monitor. Macs are consistently brighter than PC's when it comes to color palettes.

I can't give you a solution, but I had to make sure you weren't about to buy a new monitor.

duck design · Mar 29, 2004, 11:21 AM

The difference in brightness is due to the way Macs and PCs handle gamma correction. The Mac uses 1.8 and PCs use 2.5. A simplified explanation is a setting that affects the display of midtones in an image.

The simplest way to deal with this if you are using Panther you can go to System Preferences under Displays and click on Color. Select PC Calibration to approximate the gamma for a PC monitor. Adjusting your images with this calibration on should give you a more pleasing image for PC viewers.

There are additional settings in Photoshop for a greater degree of control of the gamma settings.

I hope this helps,

art_director · Mar 29, 2004, 11:42 AM

the fact remains that every monitor is going to give you a difference appearance regardless of platform. i'm not well-versed in the technical points offered by velo and duck but, speaking from an art director's perspective, i can tell you that no two monitors will give the same results.

i've stood before multiple monitors connected to pcs and macs looking at the exact same image file side by side and the differences were easily perceivable. in that situation we were trying to determine why an ad looked different in a number of newspapers even though the machines and platforms had aledgedly been callibrated. of course, there were many other contributing factors but the monitor discrepencies were vast.

insha · Mar 31, 2004, 06:56 PM

Thanks duck. Did what you said and the pictures do look a lot better on a PC.

Thanks dudes.

ghost_flash · Mar 31, 2004, 09:39 PM

Originally posted by duck design:
The difference in brightness is due to the way Macs and PCs handle gamma correction. The Mac uses 1.8 and PCs use 2.5. A simplified explanation is a setting that affects the display of midtones in an image.

The simplest way to deal with this if you are using Panther you can go to System Preferences under Displays and click on Color. Select PC Calibration to approximate the gamma for a PC monitor. Adjusting your images with this calibration on should give you a more pleasing image for PC viewers.

There are additional settings in Photoshop for a greater degree of control of the gamma settings.

I hope this helps,

PC is 2.2

Otherwise, good advice.

:

zilmer · Apr 3, 2004, 03:10 AM

To compare and switch quickly between gammas, use this tool. It's free and very handy...

http://www.thankyouware.com/gammatoggle.html

NYCFarmboy · Apr 4, 2004, 10:12 PM

This is the biggest designer headache between the platforms for web designers.

I WISH Apple would just go to the PC gamma and get standardized so we could design webpages that would not be so limited.

Because there is such a large differnce it is dangerous to design colorful webpages that use dark backgrounds. It is difficult to design a webpage that had a dark background color with white type for instance that looks correct in BOTH the Mac and PC gamma.

So..almost all designers say to use white as a background color most of the time to play it safe.

Which I think is just plain boring. I go ahead and design all my websites for the PC gamma, and use a Compac Presario notebook to double check all my web graphics to make sure they aren't too dark and that the coding works on a PC web browser.

Consequently however my pages are a bit too lite on a Mac....

Oh to have uniform standards!!!!!