I’ve been into photography for years and this is an issue that keeps coming up and discouraging me. If someone could help me resolve this, I’d be eternally grateful

Basically, I understand the concept of calibrating monitors but every time I actually calibrate mine it only makes my monitor look unusably awful and kind of ruins my prints that already looked good when posting online.

This all started ten years agon (and again, this pattern has repeated every 1 to 2 years for the past ten years)….

Ten years ago, I would take a RAW photo on my camera and transfer it to my macbook pro (yes, I know you shouldn’t edit and print from a laptop, but it’s all I had at the time). The RAW, undedited image from the camera to Lightroom looked identical. I edit the photo, post it online and it looks good from my iphone, facebook, other peoples phones and other computers. I even printed a couple photos and they looked pretty good. I am now looking at a photo that I edited at that time from my uncalibrated MBP and it looks very close to how it looks on my iphone, which is the same LR from 10 years ago.

At the time, I figured it was important to calibrate my monitor but when I did that it just destroyed the screen on the macbook. It didn’t even look close to natural and turned everything muddy brown. Now, I understand maybe I was just used to seeing the incorrect, uncalibrated version but I have an image that proves the uncalibrated screen printed just find and looked great on a screen. However, the calibrated screen looked too awful to continue using so I deleted the profile and continued editing the way I did.

Again, over the next ten years I’ve repeated this process over and over. The calibrated screen just looks too bad to deal with and it makes my images that I worked so hard on, and look good on other screens, look terrible.

So tonight I am now using a PC and a BenQ gaming monitor that is 100% SRGB accurate, I decided to calibrate again because I really really want to get into printing my images but the same thing happened. All my images, that look great on my iphone and match my uncalibrated screen to about 90% now look awful.

What am I doing wrong? I do like to game on this same screen but I’ve always just decreased the screens default color saturation and contrast to match how the images look on my iphone, which matches Lightroom pretty closely.

Also, the uncalibrated screen I am currently using looks identical to how the raw images look in camera but the calibrated screen looks nowhere near close.

I’m once again discouraged and giving up on trying to print but I’d love to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

It seems that I have to choose between editing and viewing my images on an uncalibrated screen and my images will look better on a screen or calibrate my screen and maybe they print more accurate but they will not look the same when posted online.

If there is someone out there who wants to make some money, PM and I will pay you 50$ for your time if you can help me figure out this problem.

  • ColinShootsFilm@alien.top
    BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    In addition to what others have said, you’ve linked two pretty low end consumer model monitors. Probably not worth calibrating for any purpose.

    Pro colorists use monitors in the tens of thousands of dollars. They cost that much for a reason. It’s not brightness or product life or functionality. It’s color accuracy.

    You’re bringing a $250 Amazon product to the table and expecting it to do anything even close to a $25,000 reference monitor? Not gonna happen. Plus you’re probably missing other critical intermediary hardware.

    Easiest realistic solution for you, get a MacBook Pro G2 and absolutely be close enough for your use case right out of the box. How do I know this’ll be good enough for you? If if wouldn’t, you’d already know this which means you wouldn’t be asking how to perfectly calibrate a $250 gaming monitor.