photography set-up

I spent about an hour last night doing some basic post on a bunch of pictures I took over the weekend. I was preparing them for printing (someone else will be printing them, not me - I don't print pictures - I don't think my pictures are really meant to be printed... unless they're printed large. I can't actually imagine any of my pictures in a photo album - I think it would be weird - they're just not photo album photos.) Anyway, after I was done I uploaded them to a site and started looking through them on my second computer. They looked okay... but the lights were out in the room and it was very dark. I always wonder how much light I should have in a room when I'm looking at pictures on a screen... I know that when I was at a printing studio they had the lights out and I was sitting in a dark room - not sure if that was because they didn't want to turn on the lights or if they had done that on purpose... (my printed pictures ended up printing darker than I would've liked.)

I came into work this morning and realized that the colour was completely wrong and that they were overall all very dark and unsaturated (and not in a good way.)

I have this problem every time I post process on my main computer. I usually have to run from one computer to the next at home checking what the pictures look like and then re-working them. I can't quite seem to get the calibration right. It's really frustrating.

So I started looking at hardware to help me do screen calibration. It's ridiculous... it seems like such a waste to spend $200+ on something to help me calibrate my screen. But at the same time, this whole running from computer to laptop to computer to my processing computer and re-working pictures is just not reasonable. I've been doing a lot of photography lately and spending quite a bit of time in front of the computer trying to post process pictures... It would be a much more enjoyable process if I didn't have to go through all this running around every time I process a picture. So maybe it's time to invest in this? *sigh*

I'll try re-calibrating it yet again when I get home tonight. Hopefully I can save myself some money by spending some time recalibrating using software and my eyes. Once I'm done I'll post 2 pictures I took this weekend (I'm quite pleasantly surprised with these.)


I'm also in the process of working on making myself a few different sets of black & white post-processing workflows. I have 2 so far - they're pretty basic ones. I had another one that I was quite fond of (and was using exclusively a few months ago but I haven't done it in a while so short of remembering that there was a duplicate layer with some gaussian blur on the second layer I'm lost.) I'll work on trying to remember that one and maybe post all three workflows here once I'm done (both descriptions and CS3 actions). They could probably be useful to someone out there. Stay tuned...