Match the Computer Screen to Camera LCD

    • The camera LCD screen in a dark room is very dense with pixels and brightness. The computer screen is less dense. It will be darker.

    • In summer bright day, the sun is way brighter than any device. No amount of tweaking the camera LCD screen can make it suitable as a device for assessing exposure. The EVF (electronic view finder) would be better because the sun is not flooding your eyes when you look through it, but still not perfect.

    • Computer screens for admin office use are set darker otherwise the text in a word processor or spreadsheet is against a too bright white background and hurts the eyes after less than an hour of work. Computer screens for photo editing and assessment need to be much brighter to see the full range of tones - the photo is not all white it is 90% filled with colours and tones. Get pro calibrator like a Datacolor Spyder or Xrite product. Or at minimum visually understand the different look. Use lagom's bunch of test patterns and adjust your screen by eye (not accurate but you will see gross difference between working in Microsoft Word vs looking at a photo

    • Just because you calibrate your screen does not mean the millions of viewers around the world will calibrate their screen.

    • If you have a medium or high quality IPS computer screen it will display good colours at off centre of tilted angles. Many office admin screens for word processor work and 90% of Windows notebooks only use Twisted Nematic screens which pale and dull off axis. My two notebooks are like that, I have to connect to my external desktop screen to see IPS quality suitable for photo appreciation.

    • Ensure that your camera JPEG is set to sRGB colourspace and not Adobe RGB (colloquially called aRGB) colourspace if you directly upload your the web without conversion

  • If you are shooting raw and processing raw, understand that there is no Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC) raw - the editing program always / must apply a bunch of default processing settings to your file to display it on your screen. Some factory settings are so far away from the camera profile, your image on the screen could look really dark or muted.

Reference Images (located at and copyright Lagom)

For detailed information on how to interpret these image visit http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/img/colorbands.png