Help!! Website:PC/Mac display difference!!

[Tom Stanworth]

Hi,

I have set up a website (www.thomasstanworth.com) but the colours, contrast etc are so radically different on a Mac vs the PCs I set it up on! I have access to two PCs and set it up so it worked well for both (and other PCs I have seen it on) but seeing it on a Mac - image hue/saturation is hideous! The pale and mid grey tones on the page bckground are instead ultra pale and the subtle warm tones are instead sickly sepia. If I set up the images for the Mac standard settings, then on a PC the images look overly dark low contrast and basically dead, which is not what I want!

I realise that there may be all sorts of calibration issues here, but the Macs are so incredibly different that i wonder whether there is a solution that deals with this apparent gulf. I saw under the display settings for the Mac I now have constant access to that you can switch the screen gamma between the standard for the Mac (1.8) and that for the PC (2.2) and the preview option showed that this makes a huge difference. Is this the issue?

Can anyone advise me on how to tackle the huge gulf between Mac and PC display? Its a macro difference rather than a tweaks issue - I just can't believe the difference! Iwas hoping to tweak the image hue on a number of images which need some adjustment but they ALL look awful on the Mac!!!!

Rgds

PS I fully admit to being a digital/computer/website rookie! I just reset the Mac to medium screen brightness and a gamma of 2.2 and it is a better match but still very different!

 

[Ian Grant]

Try a grey tone scale on the Mac, it may way off, there's oneDead Link Removed. It's a Tiff file but you can save as a JPEG.

Site looks fine on my laptop.

Ian

 

[tim_walls]

If the images you're using are GIFs then I doubt this is your problem, but just in case if you're using JPEGs:

Safari on the Mac is one of the very few browsers that correctly interprets the colour space of images and renders them accordingly. If the images are coming out of Photoshop marked up as 'Adobe RGB' colourspace or similar, then Safari will convert the colours accordingly to display. Internet Explorer et al just dumbly ignore the colourspace setting and treat everything as sRGB.

To make sure all browsers show images the same, make sure when you export the photos from Photoshop (or whatever) you convert the colour profile to 'sRGB'. Safari will then obey the colour space in the file and render it as sRGB (IE will carry on ignoring what's in the file and display as sRGB regardless, but that's what you want of course.)

 

[Tom Stanworth]

Thanks all! I have opened them in Safari (on both the Mac and PC) and they look the same as in Firefox so there is at least parity between the various browsers (well thats one variable that seems to be OK!) - they are all jpegs and seem to have been output in sRGB. The difference between Mac and PC remains however.

Now I think I will have to view the site on as wide a variety of 'untweaked' laptops as possible to ensure the best balance overall. I guess I cannot hope for people to have calibrated monitors etc so will have to go for some sort of an average. I think I will tone down the saturation a little so that at worst they will appear cool and straight mono rather than jaundiced on those screens pushing out higher saturation (this seems to be what the Mac is doing vs the PCs). I have noticed that the saturation is higher on the newer PCs I have been looking at it on and lowest saturation on my old compaq.

Is there a very noticeable sepia hue as you are viewing it or is it overall fairly subtle (allowing for the image to image variation which i will deal with)??

Thanks all for your help... such fast responses!

Rgds,

Tom

 

[df cardwell]

On my hyper neurotically calibrated Mac, it looks awesome...safari, + firefox = same

 

[df cardwell]

Set the Mac to 2.2 to to a Mac site for directions on simple calibration.
Easy. Yours is off.

 

[catem]

Is there a very noticeable sepia hue as you are viewing it or is it overall fairly subtle (allowing for the image to image variation which i will deal with)??

I see a noticeable sepia hue, but it is fairly subtle - if that's not a confusing answer! Not the kind of sickly hue that sepia can get, but a light sepia. Definitely there. I like slight colour tones rather than heavy ones, and it looks good to me. Many of them look like no more than a very warm-toned image.

I'm looking on a Mac CRT monitor calibrated and set at gamma 2.2

I think they look good. And the photographs themselves are excellent.

 

[Lee L]

On Firefox you may need to enter 'about:config' (no quotes) like a URL and then look for color management settings and enable them, usually a boolean value set TRUE. Depending on your computer, OS, and how you got Firefox, color management may be on or off. I'm on a PC box, but using linux with Firefox and color management enabled, screen set to 2.2, and your web page looks very good.

Nothing to report on here Safari or MSIE.

Lee

 

[phc]

I'm using a current iMac 24 and it looks pretty good to me. Pretty damn good as a matter of fact!

I've always felt that these things vary so much that all you can do is calibrate your monitor, get the pics looking the best you can, and set them free. They'll look a little different on every monitor out there, be they Mac or PC.

Cheers, Paul.

 

[Herzeleid]

Is there a very noticeable sepia hue as you are viewing it or is it overall fairly subtle (allowing for the image to image variation which i will deal with)??

They are certainly sepia noticeable enough, it varies from photo to photo (slightly in hue and saturation).

I checked the website with IE and Safari on PC, they look identical to me.

 

[ic-racer]

Nice photography. The site looks great on my Mac.

 

[bdial]

I have a Mac and a PC side by side, the site background and images are decidedly warmer on the Mac. I haven't calibrated the monitor for a while, but I'm confident that it isn't all that far off. FWIW, the Mac drives a Dell monitor, and the PC is a Dell laptop.

 

[waynecrider]

All the pics were cut in half on my Mac running Firefox 2.0.

 

[winger]

I'm running Safari on a not calibrated Macbook Pro (2 years old) and they look great. A slight sepia, but it varies from image to image, so looks intentional. Not knowing what you want them to look like, it's tough to know. But I wouldn't call it sickly or pale.

 

[Ed Sukach]

Deja vu .. all over again.

Many moons ago, I made the statement that trying to correct "wet" images from PC viewing was not a good way to go ... and was HEAPED with misery, i.e., "You KLUTZ - CALIBRATE your monitor!!"

My "direction" is to make EXHIBITION "wet" prints - not to produce PC images accepted by all. I hope we recognize that variations do exist in this electronic system and, I guess, some degree of tolerance and... squinting is really necessary.



:

 

[Tom Stanworth]

All the pics were cut in half on my Mac running Firefox 2.0.

It needs to be viewed in fullscreen to show full image area. should be no cropping when viewed that way. Because of the way the site is set up they are rather small if sized to view correctly in normal screen mode on a small monitor. I need to put in a comment on the opening screen to select full screen mode - thanks for reminding me.

Thanks everyone. I think I will try to work them so that they don't exceed the max saturation that I am happy with on a Mac and then accept further reduced saturation on the PC. I will also standardise the saturation from image to image.

I reset the mac to gamma 2.2 and it helped but there is still a significant increase in brightness and warmth on the mac screen.

Thanks so much everyone!

Tom

 

[Andy K]

Looks excellent on my Intel iMac. Great simple site layout Tom.

 

[Chazzy]

Looks fine on my iMac G5. Also, I enjoyed the photos.

 

[CBG]

Looks good on these browsers on my PC:

Chrome 1.0.154.43
Firefox 2.0.0.18
IE 7.0.5730.13
Iron 0.2.152.0

At a quick glance, all looked the same to me. No rendering issues for me.

Some wonderful photography there by the way!