Originally posted by ACPhotoDesign:
Originally posted by Britannica:
Not picking on them, but I wonder if they were Mac users. The Mac's 1.8 gamma makes images prepared on a PC (with their 2.5 gamma) look quite a bit darker. 2.2 gamma has been settled on as a good compromise between the two, and the PC monitors are starting to be calibrated to that instead of the 2.5 gamma but Macs are still at the same 1.8 gamma.
David |
Actually I think it is the other way around. Mac images look brighter on a Mac and darker on a PC. As a Mac user with an at home PC as well I often take a look at the images on my PC to check them out. You can do this with another Adobe program that's linked to PS. (I forgot the name... hate these senior moments...) It lets you look at the Mac and the PC versions of your image and tweek it to look okay on both. Ann |
Actually, you are saying the same thing I am, but saying it from the exactly opposite perspective.
Just to confuse things, gamma is really brightness and effects the overall lightness of the entire range of colors. The higher the gamma the brighter the colors. The Mac, with its default 1.8 gamma, produces images that are darker than the same image produced on a PC with its default 2.5 gamma when viewed on the same monitor. Both image would look exactly the same when viewed, side by side, each on the monitor it was produced on.
It is very similar to metering an exposer. Meter a shot on a light grey and the image will appear darker, meter it on a dark grey it will appear lighter but meter on a neutral grey and the exposure comes out good. All the metering is doing is setting what is center grey for the exposure; all gamma is doing is setting the middle brightness for the monitor.
Of course, the best way to handle this is to calibrate every monitor you use to the cross-platform standard of 2.2 gamma. That way the images will look the same when viewed on all of them. Just because a platform is standardized to a certain gamma is no reason to leave it there if you are producing images to be viewed on more than one platform.
David
/edit: I must have been more tired than I thought, but in the above gamma is adjusting the actual contrast of the image, not just the brightness. The over all effect is the same, images produced for a lower gamma have less distinction in the darker tones than images produced for a higher gamma.
Incidentally, from what I have been reading most cameras use the sRGB colorspace -- which is calibrated for a gamma of 2.2. Unless your camera specifically states that it uses a different colorspace, editing for any other gamma is just adding another action that can lose image content.
Hopefully I am awake enough I caught all the embarrassments in the original.
Message edited by author 2004-06-27 02:35:36.
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