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Hi guys,

I happened to look at my recent images on my laptop and I discovered that what looks good on my desktop computer (with very good monitor for accurate color rendering) actually looked crap on my laptop. All tonality was gone from the bright areas and it looked almost as if I had given the entire model a liberal white drybrush to finish it off. I made some experiments with brightness levels of the images and presented below are three versions of the same image at different brightness.

As I do these images with you as the intended audience could you please tell me what image looks best on your screen?

I see what you are getting at, but who's to say our monitors are correctly calibrated?!

My laptop at home is great, because I have a calibrator and I use it for my photography sideline, but my work screens aren't particularly good and I really can't see much of a difference apart from the back pack shadow and the grass. And even then it's very little.

The mini looks bloody great though, regardless!

I'm pretty sure most monitors aren't and that's kind of my point.

Thing is just like you i dabble with photography and I do all my image processing on a desktop computer with a calibrated EIZO monitor and I usually make some effort to make the images as true to the models as possible. This model is the brightest I've painted for a while and it when I looked at it on my uncalibrated laptop screen and on that screen so much detail was lost. All bright areas are washed out...

So the purpose of this poll is to find out what looks good on what ever most people are using. Is my laptop the exception or the rule? If it is the rule I will try to put all relevant detail in less bright areas in the future.

Thanks a lot! I just started painting regularly again after a looooong break and I think this might be my best work since the reboot!

IMO the top one has deeper / richer colours.
Re monitors, I used my home computer to clean this up in photoshop:

I couldn't see the crappy results until I got to work - admittedly I was using an LCD TV rather than a proper monitor.
Just shows how different screens show different results.

Compression is the culprit. Almost any web site you upload pics to will compress the files to some extent. Add to that the size limits imposed by said web site, and you lose a lot of data. Color space can play a role as well. I shoot, process and print in Adobe RGB, because of the bigger color space, however, web sites use the standard sRGB color space. I always have to remember to convert pics to sRGB before uploading. You just have to upload, see what needs to be tweaked, then re-upload til it looks the way you want. My monitor is calibrated, but it won't make a difference when uploading to a web site, especially a web site hosting a ton of pics, like Dakka, where files can get uber compressed.