The day the current PUG went up, I took a first look at each photo
on the Macintosh beside my bed.
Since then, I've had it up on the Sun downstairs (in the half of the
living room designated the server farm), occasionally hitting the
"next" button if I'm down there to work on one of those machines, or
pass through that room on my way to the kitchen.
It's interesting to note just how very differently some images work
on the different screens. (I'll get around to looking at them all
under Windows later, when I feel like resetting one of the Windows
boxen to 16-bit colour (and thus fewer pixels -- Mars Needs VRAM!).)
Some definitely look better on one than on the other. Some just
look _different_ and convey a different mood. Makes me wonder what
some of the prints look like, and which monitor comes closest for
which images. What I find especially interesting is that some seem
sharper on the Mac, and others seem sharper on the Sun. The colours
all seem more vibrant on the Sun, though some images wind up being
too dark overall.
"Kasia" (Dominik Ataman) looks a bleary, muddy mass of grey on the
Mac. Pretty on the Sun. In-between and artsy on a VGA at 256
colours. "Descending Plane" (Jostein Oksne) is _gorgeous_ on the
mac but too dark to see the plane's trail on the Sun or a 256-colour
VGA (with my usual brightness settings, of course). "Hoopster"
(Nick Wright) _is_ a silhouette (as someone suggested it be turned
into) on my 256-colur VGA.
Obviously it's not just the Mac/Sun/Windows difference (they use
different gammas, right?), but also the particular monitors in
question and where I've got the brightness and contrast knobs
turned, but it would be interesting sometime to put all three
systems in one room, side by side, and page through a PUG an
image at a time, showing the same image on each screen.
I'm sure this isn't news to most of y'all -- it wasn't exactly
a surprise to me, either -- but at the moment I'm fascinated
by it. Not that the difference exists (I've known about that
since the first time I edited an image on a Mac for someone to
view on a Win95 system), but just how it affects different images
differently.
-- Glenn
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