Art 'n Science 'n Photography

[Ben Rubinstein]

I have to admit that as I always work images for print, I'm a wedding shooter, I've calibrated my monitor and then wound down the brightness to match prints from the lab I use. I find it more convenient to always be working an image at the brightness level that it will be printed at rather than have to tweak the picture at the end of the workflow. This does result in a lot of images looking too bright on many peoples screens, it can be really annoying when I have to yank up the brightness in ACR by up to a stop eventhough the histogram was perfect, and that brings with the resulting noise issues, but it can't be helped, I have to process with the print in mind.

[Mark D Segal]

Makes sense.

[jani]

I have to admit that as I always work images for print, I'm a wedding shooter, I've calibrated my monitor and then wound down the brightness to match prints from the lab I use. I find it more convenient to always be working an image at the brightness level that it will be printed at rather than have to tweak the picture at the end of the workflow. This does result in a lot of images looking too bright on many peoples screens, it can be really annoying when I have to yank up the brightness in ACR by up to a stop eventhough the histogram was perfect, and that brings with the resulting noise issues, but it can't be helped, I have to process with the print in mind.

Yes, that makes sense.

But web images are also to some degree one's shopping window to the world (depending on what you do with it, of course). I understand that there are quite a lot of photographers who don't publish any of their images on the web simply because they feel those images misrepresent the prints they want to sell.

Since I haven't been doing many prints (and definitely haven't sold any yet ...), I haven't had a personal advantage of your kind of workflow, pom, but I'll consider it seriously if and when I get there.

Thanks!

[Mark D Segal]

Jan, what you'll find is that an image optimized for a printer is not optimized for the web and vice versa. It doesn't take much to adjust between the two so they have similar appearance; usually some tweaking of contrast bridges the gap between them, as well as saving web images in sRGB rather than RGB colour space. Adobe has a "Save for Web" command which helps alot to get the images just right for web-viewing conditions. Although I am not in this business myself, it is obvious that any photographer trying to sell images over the internet must know how to manage these adjustments so that the web view will look very similar to the finished print, and it is feasible.

[jani]

Jan, what you'll find is that an image optimized for a printer is not optimized for the web and vice versa. It doesn't take much to adjust between the two so they have similar appearance;

Oh, yes, I know, but I hadn't even considered tweaking my workflow towards printing from the very start of it.

I usually do tweaking for web or printing as the last thing.

usually some tweaking of contrast bridges the gap between them, as well as saving web images in sRGB rather than RGB colour space.

I've made a nice pair of keyboard shortcuts for the most-used commands in that regard; "Edit"->"Convert to profile" and "Image"->"Mode"->"8 bits/channel". An action could probably be justified, since function keys can be assigned to running these directly.

Adobe has a "Save for Web" command which helps alot to get the images just right for web-viewing conditions.

The "Save for Web" feature is kindof nice, but I've stepped away from it for my own web images, because I want to share most of the EXIF information. "Save for web" strips all the interesting bits.

Although I am not in this business myself, it is obvious that any photographer trying to sell images over the internet must know how to manage these adjustments so that the web view will look very similar to the finished print, and it is feasible.

It is feasible if your customer-to-be is using a calibrated monitor of sufficient quality. Otherwise, almost all bets are off. I've gotten the strangest complaints about how some of my sRGB converted images look on uncalibrated monitors, even though they look fine on the six or seven different monitors I can check them on myself.