Monitor Injustice

After having been to several different homes for Christmas visiting so far this year and checking out my APUG portfolio pictures on other monitors, it really is amazing to me how someone else's monitor can totally do your photographs an injustice. I never saw one monitor that correctly displayed my photos the way I would like them to be seen. I realize that's the way things are and you really can't do anything about it, but I was wandering how this may affect one's online success rate in terms of sales, probably hard to ascertain, IDK..

You have to hope that people likely to buy photographs know something about color management. Maybe if you're really lucky they have calibrated their monitors.

And almost no one calibrates their monitors.

I have a calibrated wide gamut monitor but, there are other layers of problems as well. The monitor itself maybe calibrated but not all application software, especially some of the most popular web browsers are not color profile aware. On top of it, lighting condition of the room can do a trick on human eyes. I'd imagine people serious enough to buy photographs would know about color management and have their equipment calibrated accordingly. For casual users, even quite a bit of color shift aren't even perceived. Heck, I didn't even know how off my colors were until I started editing photographs here and sending them to be printed by labs. (but that perhaps is off topic for this forum)

I entered a local art prize not to long ago, you had to send your entries on a disc. No hard copies, they would then cull and ask for the hard copies later. With the setting on my system the pictures look OK. I didn't even get a mention. When I printed the two submitted images for another show they both sold. The majority were DOP (digital output paper) My enlarged 4 x 5 neg and a 8 x 10 salt print really stood out. I just wonder how you can combat it in a PHD world (push here dummy)?????????????

CPorter said:

. . . I never saw one monitor that correctly displayed my photos the way I would like them to be seen. . . .

Click to expand...

People who use one of those maladjusted or poor monitors are viewing your and others' images on the same monitor. This lets them compare, if not truely evaluate, your images on a familiar monitor. Superior images look better than poor ones on a poor monitor. It isn't ideal, but works for many people.