PW4GDF

As we know the colors and light or dark on a laptop screen vary greatly according to the angle of the screen. When printing pictures myself I can adjust the color if it is not right.
I am about to put pictures on to a drive to give to the family I did a shoot for yesterday do they can have their own printed.
How can I be sure - or can I that the colors that I am happy with on my screen will be OK on another computer?
Do I set the screen brightness to the highest?
Any suggestions welcome.
Also the suggestion a few weeks back I asked about about printing on adhesive paper. Just to let you know I got full sheet size Avery clear see through labels and it has worked really well for the craft project I wanted it for. Thanks!

ebbote Loc: Hockley, Texas

It doesn't make a difference where you set your brightness on your computer, it will not translate to what the other computer sees. There is
nothing you can do on yours that will change how it looks on theirs.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

:thumbup: Unfortunately.
Think of looking at 20 tvs in the store, how varied are the pictures on them?

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

As pointed out, there's not much you can do.

But here's one thing that you could do:
On your laptop screen, look at something that supposed to be pure white. If it appears as light gray instead of white, you will then know that your screen isn't bright enough, or your screen needs a little tilting to display the white properly.

Apaflo Loc: Anchorage, Alaska

With the colors, using a laptop there really is not much at all you can do. You set yours one way, they set theirs their way...

But screen brightness is a different thing. You can measure the image, and set it almost totally independent of any monitor or printer.

Use an editor with a good histogram display. Areas that are supposed to have some detail should never have a pixel value of more than 245 nor less that about 20. At the bright end of the scale it is fairly distinct, and even though values at say 250 are not actually blown, everything from 245 to 255 will be washed out to the degree that no texture is visible. The most common place where that makes a difference is the shine on people's faces.

On the dark side there is more leeway, and the cutoff is some point between about 15 and 25 or 30. But 20 is a good target, and with most monitors or prints there will be no details in areas with values that low.

All of that can be seen and measured with an histogram while never so much as even looking at the image itself. What is done while looking at the image is adjusting relative brightness of some areas compared to others. Our eyes cannot tell how bright any given area alone actually is (e.g., a 230 value instead of 250), but we can compare two areas side by side and see very slight differences such as values of 240 and 243. So when using a curves tool the histogram is useful, but actually looking at the image itself is essential.