Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by slantyyz 3069 days ago
Serious question: If you're not selling work to be printed or resold as stock, how important is calibration these days?

Given the proliferation of the screen as a photo consumption device, and considering how just about every screen out there has slightly different properties (color temp & gamut, brightness and contrast, OLED vs LCD), what will calibration necessarily accomplish?
1 comments
ISL 3069 days ago
Calibration puts you (hopefully) in the middle of the distribution of errors, so your viewer is more likely to see pretty much what you intended.

I publish a lot of black and white images in part to further reduce the uncertainty of the end-viewer's calibration. Can't get a perceived color cast if there's no color.

link
yoodenvranx 3069 days ago
> Calibration puts you (hopefully) in the middle of the distribution of errors

That would be an interesting research topic! Perhaps the average color of the un-calibrated displays is not the same as the one of a calibrated display.

For example most TV are put in some very colorful mode from factory and most user don't bother to switch it. The same is true for old Samsung mobile phones which had a lot of popping colors. You could switch them to more realistic tones but nobody ever did this.

link
slantyyz 3069 days ago
>> Can't get a perceived color cast if there's no color.

But you can still have other problems depending on the dynamic range of your photos.

I often edit my photos so that stuff in shadows are not perceptible. The problem is that I edit on my laptop LCD screen, but on my phone OLED at default settings, I see clearly everything that was supposed to be hidden in the shadows.

link