Best practice for post brightness/gamma!?

[Marsu42]

I'm just through processing through a batch of my horsies photos, and send the preview link to a friend of mine. One feedback is that he feels that the exposure from post is too bright for his monitors.

I have absolutely no clue how to get around this issue. On my calibrated monitors the global brightness looks just fine. However, I admit I work in strongly varying ambient light. My simplistic approach so far is to put the main bump of the histogram near the center at least on low-contrast scenes when I've got the choice.

My specific shooting style, however you like it, makes it worse: I like to have back-lit subjects, so the internal brightness distribution (gamma) matters a lot as the subjects either look over-brightened or too dark and details are lost.

Question: Are there any guidelines (links?) on how to process digitial images for optimal brightness with general display? Or is this more a matter of personal, subjective perception? Do you know this problem, how do you handle it?

 

[privatebydesign]

Hey there Marsu,

I run in to this all the time, sending people images that not only don't have decent or calibrated monitors, they have the brightness turned right up too. I will often turn my laptop brightness up to the max just to see an image as many who view it will see it.

Many people now put their images on a web page with a ramp on it to make sure the brightness level is within a reasonable range, DPReview use them on their test pages.

Your images look fine to me, and as I am sure you know, D65 is a WB setting and doesn't have anything to do with brightness. The histogram bump belongs anywhere in the range that accurately reflects the scene, if it is a shady scene the bump should be below the midpoint, if it is in the light then above makes more sense, but again, your images look fine on my monitors too.

Don't confuse his monitor brightness with your processing.

As for the capital letters or not, they are the title so should be capitals.

Hope this helps.

 

[Marsu42]

Many people now put their images on a web page with a ramp on it to make sure the brightness level is within a reasonable range, DPReview use them on their test pages.

Right, that's a good idea, doesn't hurt to have this around on the splash page for a slideshow!

Your images look fine to me, and as I am sure you know, D65 is a WB setting and doesn't have anything to do with brightness.

Um, embarrassing mix-up :-> - what I meant to write was that the x-rite software recommends to set a much lower cd/m2 brightness to get an idea about the print, but I ignored this and have set my monitor to the max brightness - which makes it even more confusing why my friend found the shots too bright. Probably it's his personal taste, he's very fond of low-key scenes.

Don't confuse his monitor brightness with your processing.

I'm trying not to, but because I've got ultra-crappy monitors and don' really trust what I'm seeing - my next purchase will be a decent monitor that isn't so dependent on the angle of view :-\

As for the capital letters or not, they are the title so should be capitals.

Thanks, so my guess was correct for once. The English keywords are just a gimmick, but I though it won't hurt to enter both English and German in LR. I had to set up my own post-processing script to switch them though because LR doesn't have a native interface for multilingual metadata.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, you're always very helpful with this postprocessing problems! I'm hoping some other people can also share how they handle the "client's monitor brightness" problem...