colour management/monitor etc

[MandyJay]

Okay. How should a system be set up to correctly view colours.
If you go to my site www.scriptfx.com the left hand graphic menu - I nearly died when I saw it on someone elses monitor.

1. There is a grey line around the graphic - there is not on my monitor.
2. click on the graphic prog link - same menu image but with grey background - should be transparent, I made the home page one transparent but ended up with the grey line - on my monitor ALL the menu graphics have black background same as page.

go to my village site www.monktoncombe.com - yukky yuk!! The blue and orange are so insipid on other peoples monitors, yet on mine they are both strong vibrant colours!!! disaster!!!

I have a gateway EV700 Monitor, set for High Colour (16bit) . Now under colour management (desktop settings) there is no default colour profile associated with the monitor. I have tried altering the actual colour of the monitor itself but cannot recreate how I saw my site on another monitor (in fact two different monitors have viewed my site the same - totally different from how mine views it) ...... so what is the answer ... how are other people viewing my site - is it as awful as it appears to be! Some people have commented they cannot read the blue text against the black background, yet on my monitor it is virtually as clear as black on white ........
comments please???? Have I a naff monitor, should I change it, if so to what????

[Kandicav]

Hi MJ! I haven't a problem reading the text on your script site. I think both sites look fine to me, but as you mentioned the grey borders and grey background, it is apparent on my monitor as well. although to someone who does not know they are not supposed to be that way, they look fine. Your home site looks fine. Colors are not as vibrant as you describe, but soft as I thought they were supposed to be. I think after you have seen them on another computer it has shocked you cuz you want them to look a different way. They dont look as bad as you think they do. Really! I use a sony flat monitor. I have a 17" Dell monitor which is a fantastic monitor, but not hooked up to net right now, so can not test your site. I can however test it on my dad's computer this weekend. I will let you know.

[RocketMan]

Mandy,

Your monitor may be going out, or just dark. Rather than the settings within Windows, you might also want to check the settings on the monitor itself. If it's digitally controlled, it may also have a reset or default setting button.

My laptop is usually way brighter than my desktop. One time I color/white balanced several light bulb images on my dekstop for a lighting company, and most of the white on white bulbs were washed out on my laptop. They looked good on most regular monitors, but on my laptop and other flat panel screens, they were gone. Since then I made sure to have as many different looks at other monitors to get an idea where my workstation monitor fits into the mix of real-world display.

I also have windows computers with 15, 17 and 19" standard monitors, an Imac with a 15" monitor, a laptop with a 15" flat panel, and another workstation with an external flat panel. Between all those machines I usually feel pretty good about what everyone else is seeing in terms of color. My Sony Trinitron 17" on my desk workstation is still just barely a tad darker than all the others, but I've used it so long I know what's going to be seen on the average by everyone else.

Start taking a look at how things compare on other systems to your monitor and either change your settings to match, replace it with one that will match better, or do a little self-compensation when working with color so you know what it will look like on other monitors.

And of course, no two monitors will ever truly see your site exactly the same way...but there's a happy medium in there somewhere.

>>> RM >>>

[MandyJay]

Hi RM
I have checked everything I can think of checking, have been trying to reproduce how I saw my site on other monitors, but cannot do it! How can I test colours?? Is there a way to test whether colours are being viewed as they should be viewed??
What I dont understand, is the menu graphic I have on scriptsite has a black background to it, the page has black background and on my monitor you cannot see the grey to the image. Why can I see both as black, when other people see the image background as grey and page as black??? Surely, whatever difference was on my monitor I should still get two different colours???- but I dont, they both show as black, and even when I make the picture transparent I dont get the grey line, so how the heck am I meant to correct everything! The problem I now have, is I do not know what shows differently on peoples sites, if one image does, then no doubt lots of others do, and my site has tons of images. The monitor I have is one that came with system, so a cheap naff one. May just invest in new one - a 19" this time!! I have checked every setting I can find on monitor, desktop setting colour managment and colour profile etc etc, no way can I reproduce what you and everyone else sees!! grrrrrr!

[captain]

Hi Mandy Jay,
Welcome Back!!
I checked both sights out and they look good to me. The blue text stands out nicely on my laptop but there is a grey box around the navigation image. I honestly thought it belonged there. I had to reread your post to make sure that is what you were talking about. It honestly looks good.
Your village site colors do look soft or dusty but it looks intentional. I sorta like it that way.
Hmmm are you sure you aren't just posting tp regain the lead?:roll:

[MandyJay]

Hi Captain,
Thanks for welcome back. I know what you are saying, but my point is, I cannot tell what the rest of my sites are like, there are hundreds of pages on the village site and loads on the scriptsite, those two pages may look okay to you, even though they are not what I intended, but I have no way of checking to see what the other pages look like on both sites, the pages do not all stick to the same template, plus with the script site, the navigation section, the menus rely on the colour, so do many pages on the graphics section .... so you see the problem is more widespread than just those two pages.

[jtmat]

MandyJay,

I got the strange colors on my computer as well as the grey line and background.

I opened IE 6 and NS 6 and got the same results.

I'll toy with my machine to see if I can make it go away.

I have a Maxtech monitor with a 16 meg video card (I think)... win xp, 256 meg, amd 1.2


I do agree with Kandicav that if you did not know it looked natural. Might be the CSS.

mat

[MandyJay]

HI,
Thanks, but do not worry about ****** with your machine, I managed to break my old monitor yesterday! the knob came off and then couldnt alter the settings, so bought new monitor and now I can see all the colours as they should be, so next week will be going through the pages altering them all!!

[jtmat]

OK... flat panel?

[afterwards]

If it's html that you are altering, you can do a global change. I've done it, but not often enough to say off hand how it's done. I've also done partial global change--again can't really say how--except that was done by find and replacing more of the code in increments. The few minutes it takes to figure out is well worth it--since the changes just take seconds. bev

[MandyJay]

Hi Gang,
Well I have now changed all the colours on both my sites - and hopefully changed most of the graphics to blend in with the colours. Yes, I used search and replace all pages to do it - Thank you Front Page!!!! So anyone else reads this, the colours are not wishy washy like I first stated ( I hope!). Just another observation, did a search for Graphic Programmes in Google and came out tops! Wow I thought .... then brain went to work and thought "no way" - of course that is the English spelling!!! Did another search of Graphics Programs - Hee! nowhere to be seen. Anyway, used good old search and replace to change as much of my English spelling to USA spelling - two main words being Programme/Program and Colour/color (I also added the "t" on the end of Javascrip ... in my keywords!)

[Kandicav]

Hi MJ, Your sites look great. I must say that I do like the villiage site now better than before. I can see the vibrant colors you were talking about now. I only briefly looked at the sites. But I did notice a couple of misspellings in it. If you are trying to change the spelling of colour to color and programme to program, On the first page there are two instances where this did not occur. One being colour and the other programme. I'll have a better look at it later. It is only 6:30 here, still haven't had my coffee. :crazy:

[MandyJay]

Thanks Kandi, but dont worry about checking for words, there is a difference between programme and programmes! Still have some changing to do, also FP doesnt seem to want to change them all, does miss some out - have other changes to make to pages anyway. Cheers.

[klxdrt]

Mandy, I lookeed at your sites & the colors were ok on my cheap 17" monitor. I ran into a similiar thing that let me to do some testing of colors, monitors, scanners, color printers.

I created Pantone colors from pantone software, saved as a hi rez png file and published on my site at : http://216.105.156.85/precisionmarketing/pantone.htm

I used Pantone colors because may people are familiar with what some basic colors look like with real eyes, not a monitor. I also, printed them, scanned them and comapred them with my own eyes/monitor etc. to get a sense of how close they were to the Pantone std.

Results were generally pretty good considering???


Hope this helps.

Herb

hhw@charter.net (temp email)

[MandyJay]

Hi Herb,
Thanks for that, will do some comparisons later. Think I will have to play around with printer though as all colours seem to come out virtually same as seen on screen except for the blues, they all come out several shades lighter :(:
Cheers