Does Aperture calibrate brightness and color based on your display's color profile?
The reason I ask this question is that photos I edit that appear bright, vibrant, contrasty and happy on my iMac monitor often appear dark and muddy when I export them and view them on other non-Apple computers.
When I view A3 exported images on my IBM ThinkPad w/Dell display in software such as Microsoft Office Picture Manager and hit the Auto Correct button, it invariably fixes the images by brightening and adding contrast – making them look like they looked on my iMac display to begin with. Note, this is AFTER I have already run the auto exposure adjustment and/or auto curves adjustment in Aperture.
So I’m wondering if the color and brightness settings used by the system to calibrate my monitor are being used by Aperture to define what normal brightness and colors are supposed to be. If not, is there a way to recalibrate A3 to automatically calculate brighter so my images don’t look like crap on other computers?
Bill,
Disclaimer: I’m no ColorSync expert, so take all this with that in consideration!
Aperture uses ColorSync, which is the OS-wide color management system. I’m not familiar with Microsoft Office Picture Manager but I’d guess it’s not a ColorSync aware application. Do you have something like Photoshop on the PC that you can check it in? That’d give you a more accurate rendition.
If not, try downloading Safari for the PC, and viewing the image there (you can just drag a jpg into a blank Safari window to open there). Does that look more like it does on the Mac?
Years ago Apple adjusted the default gamma of their display calibration to match the PC world (one of the few instances I can think of where Apple conceded). So technically your image should look the same (on a comparable quality and equally calibrated monitor) regardless if it’s a Mac or PC.
I’m not familiar with your PC setup, but most PCs I’ve seen have awful screens. All it takes is a walk through a BestBuy to see that. So no matter the calibration, a crap screen will always give a crap image.
The fact that it’s looking better on the PC after running auto-correct is a little odd though. I’d guess that it’s overcompensating, but without seeing it that’s hard to say.
Are you looking at the exported images on the Mac as well, or are you still looking at them in Aperture? Open the JPG in Preview and be sure you’re seeing the same thing there as you saw in Aperture itself.
The other thing to do is look at the histogram. If you know how to read a histo, then be sure that the image you’re seeing in Aperture is technically bright/dark enough and what you see on screen looks like what you see in the histogram. Then in Microsoft Office Picture Manager if you can look at a histogram, compare it — it should be identical to the one in Aperture, regardless of how the image “looks” on screen. If it’s different, then you’ve got a whole other problem. If it’s the same, what happens to it when you hit the auto-correct button in the MS software?
Color calibration across systems is nearly impossible. The best you can hope for is ensure that your images are technically good (look at the histo), and that a color profile is embedded (check export settings). After that, it’s out of your hands. And hope that your audience isn’t using Firefox, which by default turns ColorSync off to speed up rendering (at least they used to… might be different today, couldn’t say for sure).
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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First, thank you Joseph for your thorough reply. I really appreciate it.
To respond to some of your feedback:
• I don’t have Photoshop on my PC. The Dell monitor I have hooked-up to my ThinkPad is a not a high quality monitor. However, I have had confirmation from several others to whom I’ve sent photos that some of them are dark and muddy looking. On your advice, I loaded one such photo into Safari for PC, Firefox, Microsoft Picture Manager, and PowerPoint on my ThinkPad. Each renders them nearly identically (i.e. equally bad, although Picture Manager might be slightly warmer).
• On my iMac, the photos look equally good whether I’m viewing them in Aperture, Photoshop Elements, Preview, Microsoft Entourage, etc.
• My histograms look good on my iMac, although the images that exhibit this problem with tend to skew to the left (e.g. wedding reception photos in a dark dance hall where the subjects close to the camera are flash lighted and the background is 1 to 2 stops underexposed). None of the software I have on my PC shows a histogram (it’s a company issued machine).
To combat this problem I usually brighten the image in Aperture by grabbing the diagonal line in curves at the mid-tone marker and lifting it until the highlights appear to begin blowing out.
I’m sure I need to color calibrate my iMac (mid-2007 24”). I just want to know if doing so will simultaneously recalibrate the how Aperture determines what is acceptably bright. I know that I cannot make my photos look perfect on every crap computer out there, but I’ve gotten enough feedback from others and seen the effect myself enough to know that things aren’t right the way they are.
Bill,
See if you can find some freeware for your PC that will show histograms. I think it’s pretty important to see what you’re getting there. It should be identical to what you see on the Mac.
Grab the big gradient card from here tedfelix.com/Photography/spyder.html and look at it on your Mac and on your PC. You should be able to see all stripes separately on both screens. For example on my (uncalibrated) iMac, I can very clearly see the difference between every stripe, including 15 & 16 as well as 1 & 2 (although 1 & 2 are the hardest to see the difference). This will at least show you if things are gumming up on one screen or another.
Feel free to post one of the problem images where I can see it, and I’ll see how it looks on my Mac. If you haven’t compared it to another Mac screen, it’s of course possible that it’s your Mac screen that’s a problem.
Calibrating your screen won’t help others when looking at it. As it is, your screen should be using the built-in iMac display profile [screenshot from System Preferences > Displays], and on export, the basic sRGB profile will be embedded [screenshot]. Profiling only gets useful when you’re calibrating to a scanner or printer.
If it’s the shadows you’re having a problem with, you may be darling the images too much overall. Try enabling Black Point Compensation on export (it’s just under the highlighted red box in the screenshot above). The manual has this to say about it:
Black Point Compensation checkbox: Select this checkbox to scale the black and white luminance values to the selected ColorSync profile. Activating black point compensation can prevent shadows from appearing as solid black.
What this means is that if you try to darken things too much, the image will be lifted (lightened) so the the darkest value is within range of the color profile. It’s kind of a safety net. I never use this because quite often I deliberately crush the blacks, and I don’t want the software “correcting” that for me on export. But in your case it’s worth a try.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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