Tint in my photos between Mac/Ipad and PC

[teflsue]

I love my Mac. I recently converted to Mac (Dec) and also have an ipad.
However I do loads of photo editing and when I go to a PC and check, everything has a blueish tinge.
The odd thing is it's not just on one or other of my machines, both of them tell me everything is perfect and my white balance is great, it's when I go to view the same picture on a PC I notice it.
Here is the url to show you what I mean (maybe - but I'm doing this on a PC now so don't know if it will work.

This pic was edited on a PC and has good white balance (as far as I can see)
https://www.etsy.com/listing/49823178/silver-heart-pendant-chunky-love-heart

These next two were both edited on my Mac (and look great on there and the ipad)
and here on this PC both look blue / grey and dark.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/86338881/silver-pea-pod-necklace-two-peas-in-a
https://www.etsy.com/listing/97060791/bird-pendant-silver-necklace-love-bird

Does anyone know what I should do? or if it's all the PC's I'm looking at instead. When I look at all of them on my mac and ipad they all look like they have good white balance.

 

[WRP]

Not all monitors are the same. That's why a color calibrated monitor is so vital to color correcting and post processing.

 

[TheDrift-]

Maybe this?

Try exporting in sRGB and leaving this bit of metadata intact

 

[teflsue]

Not all monitors are the same. That's why a color calibrated monitor is so vital to color correcting and post processing.

er. oh dear, how does one go about calibrating a monitor?

 

[WRP]

er. oh dear, how does one go about calibrating a monitor?

I don't know on Windows. In OS X you can go to system preferences and click on Display. Click the color tab. Then you can create a profile and calibrate it. Know though that most computer monitors are still not color accurate. True color accurate displays cost thousands of dollars. Dell Ultrasharps, HP Dreamcolors, and some NEC's are the best "sort of color accurate" displays.

You could also get something like the Spyder monitor calibrator but it's overkill for something that isn't accurate to begin with.

 

[snberk103]

While WRP is sorta correct (imo) it's not as quite as pointless as they may think.

Calibrating your monitor simply means getting it to display the colours as accurately as possible - within the limits of the entire workflow (which includes the camera/scanner, printer, and the monitor.) There are very good monitors that cost a lot and do a pretty good job of displaying all the colours. There are really cheap monitors that don't display many colours, and colours that they do display they display differently week to week. Most Apple displays fall somewhere in the middle range.

A Spyder (and there are other hardware calibrators as well) includes a sensor you hang in front of the monitor, and some software. When you run the calibration the SW tells the computer to display a bunch of colours (one after the other) and the sensor reads the colours and calculates the difference between the requested and actually displayed colour. The SW then creates a profile for the monitor which adjusts the colours that the monitor displays.

A couple of things to note. Monitors display the image using back lighting. So everything on a monitor looks better than in real life... 'cause it glows, man. Monitors can not display all the colours that the human eye can see (if there is a monitor that can display all the colours, you can't afford it.) Therefore all monitors are shifting colours to what they can display. Cameras can't see all the all the colours that the human eye can see (see note above) so your photos are already colour compromised.

If you are printing your photos, then ideally you want the monitor to only display the colours that your printer is capable of printing. That's where the monitor profile starts to come into play. Along with the monitor profile is a paper/printer profile (the paper manufacturers provide this).

The problem I have with giving you any more advice is that I've never bothered to determine if an iPad can be profiled/calibrated. And I don't know how to calibrate a PC, other than through a HW device like a Spyder. However - as stated above a Mac can be eyeballed into calibration using the calibration tab in the Display Preferences. It'll be close, but depending on how good your eye is it may not be close enough.

Also know that laptops are notoriously difficult to calibrate. Only because you have a user control to dim/brighten the screen (which de-calibrates it), plus often they have auto dim features, plus people move their laptops from one type of ambient lighting to another.

That's another point about calibrating your monitor.... when you do so, calibrate it in the same kind of room lighting that you will be working in. And let the monitor warm up for at least 1/2 an hour before calibrating and/or editing your photos.

Good Luck.

... and this is why the successful pro photographers earn the big bucks....

 

[teflsue]

Thank you all so much for your info.
What worries me is that my Mac looks just perfect to my eyes, and everything I look on with my pics looks great if its made by Apple. The PC monitors show it looking less than wonderful, but they aren't my machines. There doesn't really seem much point calibrating my machine to look as crap as a PC (;-).
I wonder whether it is in fact just the fact that my mac / iPad (and friends iPad) are just superior machines, and show the reality and the PCs (where I work) are just not as good.
Is this an issue anyone knows gets mentioned elsewhere? As I said earlier, I'm new to Macs, got sold with the iPad and the stunning quality. I am now getting lost as to what I'm actually asking.
Maybe all the machines where I work were badly calibrated?

 

[WRP]

My Dell, my Acer and My Mitsubishi TV, all plugged into the same mac display colors very differently.

 

[snberk103]

My Dell, my Acer and My Mitsubishi TV, all plugged into the same mac display colors very differently.

Yep. WRP makes a good point. It is not the computer that changes the colour, it is the monitor.

Older monitors tend to colour drift more than new ones. Yes... this is a an issue. Adobe has lots of info on a colour workflow on their site. Welcome to the wonderful world of colour management, and to Macs!

It gets weirder, btw. If you have two monitors that are relatively close (but not identical) to each other in terms of colour accuracy and if both are reasonably close to the "true colour".... then regardless of which monitor you start with, the 2nd monitor will look "off". Even if both monitors are only "reasonably" close to accurate - the 1st monitor will look fine, and the 2nd monitor will look wrong.... regardless of which monitor you start looking at first. That is why we use HW calibration tools (like the Spyder) - our eyes are not actually that good figuring out good starting point for colour accuracy. What are eyes are, in fact, very good at is determining the differences in colour. Show someone two very close (but not identical) colour patches and they can spot the difference side by side.

Also... the colour of the wall behind the monitor affects your colour perception, as does the colour of the ambient lighting. Take a piece of red paper, and cut it in half. Put one piece against a larger green paper, and the other against a different colour. Play with the paper against different backgrounds, including black and white. You'll start to see what we're talking about.

Luck.

 

[teflsue]

"Older monitors tend to colour drift more than new ones. Yes... this is a none issue. Adobe has lots of info on a colour workflow on their site. Welcome to the wonderful world of colour management, and to Macs!

I think I'll take this as my answer - a none issue ;-)

 

[lordonuthin]

I love my Mac. I recently converted to Mac (Dec) and also have an ipad.
However I do loads of photo editing and when I go to a PC and check, everything has a blueish tinge.
The odd thing is it's not just on one or other of my machines, both of them tell me everything is perfect and my white balance is great, it's when I go to view the same picture on a PC I notice it.
Here is the url to show you what I mean (maybe - but I'm doing this on a PC now so don't know if it will work.

This pic was edited on a PC and has good white balance (as far as I can see)
https://www.etsy.com/listing/49823178/silver-heart-pendant-chunky-love-heart

These next two were both edited on my Mac (and look great on there and the ipad)
and here on this PC both look blue / grey and dark.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/86338881/silver-pea-pod-necklace-two-peas-in-a
https://www.etsy.com/listing/97060791/bird-pendant-silver-necklace-love-bird

Does anyone know what I should do? or if it's all the PC's I'm looking at instead. When I look at all of them on my mac and ipad they all look like they have good white balance.

I'm at work using a pc and cheap dell monitors and your pictures look fine to me, I will go home to see how they look on my Mac and iPad.

I think part of the problem is that people are more or less sensitive to color variation too, I don't think I am as sensitive as some are and so I don't notice a difference like someone else would...

 

[snberk103]

"Older monitors tend to colour drift more than new ones. Yes... this is a none issue. Adobe has lots of info on a colour workflow on their site. Welcome to the wonderful world of colour management, and to Macs!

I think I'll take this as my answer - a none issue ;-)

Sorry teflsue, that should have read "an issue" not "none issue". Stupid Auto Correction.... though I should have proof read the post a bit better. Corrected my post....

 

[teflsue]

"Sorry teflsue, that should have read "an issue" not "none issue". Stupid Auto Correction.... though I should have proof read the post a bit better. Corrected my post...."

ha ha - yeah ! Just when you think you have the answer that works for you! Thank you for correcting that !

 

[snberk103]

teflsue - the big question is... what are doing with the images? That is - are you, and only you, looking at them on your computer? Or you sharing them with other people who look at them on their computers? Or are you printing them? The answer to that will help you figure out how much time to spend getting things "right".

The hardest thing is getting your monitor and printer to in synch, and the easiest is to adjust your monitor so that you like looking at the photos.

One other thing I should have noted above. The colour of a photo does not change from computer to computer... (some rare exceptions, that you are not likely to see). A photo that goes from Mac to PC to Linux is going to have the same colour on each computer, because in the computer it is still just a digital file and each colour is represented by a number. It is the way that the computer/monitor interprets those numbers to display the colours in a way that you can see them on the monitor.

For example... say you have a photo that looks great on computer 1 that you then open up on computer 2. On computer 2 it looks totally green. If you do nothing, and don't change anything, it will look great on computer 1 still. There will be no changes. If, however, you edit the photo on computer 2 to make it look like it should - then on computer 1 it will look magenta.