Help with displaying website images

[David_Senesac]

Steve, I'd agree in office conditions calibration for images doesn't make sense and that is why I rejected a need to do so in the business environment.

Marko, you're correct about how little the average user knows, however that is certainly changing. However just about everybody today has a little digital camera, is looking at images online, printing things out on their $99 inkjet printers at home, or having prints made from kiosks at their local Walmart etc. Thus many are becoming aware of some problems with color when they come home with pics where everyone's face looks green. The industry producing all this high tech stuff is certainly not going to require everyone to buy monitor calibration aps? They may do nothing as has been the status quo but I'm betting some wise minds will eventually figure out something cheap like my idea. Better yet will be when cheap self calibration screen sensor IC's are incorporated into monitor designs. It could be done today and should be but consumer electronic designs tend to be controlled by companies only with near term profit motivations. ...David

[Stephen Willard]

I have one "check station" in a local eye glass store. They just purchased two new Apple iMacs. It is clear to me that they have not calibrated their computers. I would guess they are using the factory default, and I estimate the gamma is about 1.4.

I have two PC check stations I visit, and I guess the gamma for those systems are around 2.5 or more. Out of the six systems I visit only one looks like it may have been calibrated for viewing images on the web. The others do not have a clue.

If you are using your website informally then this is not a big deal. Just calibrate your gamma at 2.2 and use the color profile sRGB. However, if you are trying to sell images over the web then this is a serious problem. If the images do not look good then they will not sell!

[Marko]

If you are using your website informally then this is not a big deal. Just calibrate your gamma at 2.2 and use the color profile sRGB. However, if you are trying to sell images over the web then this is a serious problem. If the images do not look good then they will not sell!

Stephen, it is less of a problem than it may seem at a first glance. It is actually a problem that alleviates itself to a good extent, strange as it may sound.

Human vision in general and color perception in particular is very adaptive - the brain "knows" that your shirt is white and sees it as such whether you stand in shadow under the deep, blue sky or under the mercury street light in the evening. A person with normal vision, especially one that is unaware of these finer points we are discussing here, will see every image on every website they visit through the same distorted color and gamma setting, and thus will be so accustomed to it that their brain will see your images almost as you intended.

That leaves you with only two things you can do about it and one you shouldn't: Fine tune your images to look their best under gamma 2.2, convert them to sRGB and don't worry any further.