tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

been using panasonic lumix fz45 for about a year now. have used various colour modes and pic quality always looks fine on camera screen. when transferred to computer they always need editing as pic quality is dull. convinced it is a computer problem, any ideas folks. am using windows 7 on HP pavilion laptop. sample pics on computer are fabulous incidentally. Yours, Tom.

jimni2001 Loc: Sierra Vista, Arizona, USA

What I find to be the problem wit laptop screens is that your line of sight needs to be at 90 degrees to the screen. Any variation changes the color temperature of the photo and the contrast and even the sharpness. I am in the process of moving and my desktops are in storage right now so I am stuck doing my work on a laptop. If you are shooting in a raw format then what you are seeing in the camera is a jpeg preview of the raw file and will need to be processed to achieve the finished look you are going for. Hope this helps some.

traveler90712 Loc: Lake Worth, Fl.

Is your screen resolution high enough to view the picture properly?
Is there enough RAM on your graphics card?

Both of these can effect the way the picture is displayed.

tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

Have never used raw, to complicated. Am using maximum recommended screen resolution. 1366x768.

EstherP

My screen resolution on my laptop is 1920 x 1080. I find that a comfortable resolution to work with.

AS to using RAW, it actually is not complicated at all. You can do PP in RAW that would be very difficult if not impossible in .jpg
What I would like to suggest is that you open a RAW image in ACR and play with the sliders. Move them a little bit, a lot, and keep an eye on your image and on the histogram at the top to see what is happening. I found that was the fastest way to learn ACR.
EstherP

tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

When i edit my pics on windows photo gallery they are very good, i was just trying to figure out why so good on camera screen but dull on computer.

tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

Think am bit of an imbecile here, dont know what ACR is, sorry. Tom

EstherP

No, absolutely not an imbecile here. I think that those of us who have been doing editing for some time, kind of take for granted that everyone knows the lingo.
ACR - Adobe Camera Raw, the plug-in for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements that lets you open RAW images.

Oh, by the way, you would be stupid if you read something you don't understand, and then you don't ask ;-)
EstherP

n3eg Loc: West coast USA

In my limited experience with Irfanview (OK, you can quit laughing now) I found that the resizing to fit the screen can cause problems. If it's something that fits the screen at 23% or some other odd number/multiple, it will look really bad. Other multiples like 25%, 20%, or similar will look better.

EstherP

Please then, tell us what the joke is, so I can even start laughing...
Nothing wrong with Iranview, just because you don't see it mentioned on the Hog very often, doesn't mean it is bad, or ridiculous or whatever.
I have never used it myself, but have heard/read a lot of positive comments about that program.
EstherP

drjuice

Hi,

I'd suggest that you get involved with Color Munkey and similar products so that you can make the colors match on all your computer monitors and also have good color fidelity when you decide to print.

The general process is called color matching and your general objective is to have a particular picture look the same, particularly in terms of color, across all your output devices, whether monitor, printer, or process printing by an actual printing firm.

Hope this helps.

v

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

You must remember that the sample pix in Windows have probably been post edited to death for massive dynamic range and rich colors. They may have also been originally shot with a $50,000 full frame camera or even a medium or large format film camera. Many years ago Bill Gates started building a database of digital versions of the most famous art and photography in the world to compete with Google and the goal was to accumulate digital files of every single one in the world. I don't know what happened to that project but I'm sure he's got digital photos that would blow your eyes out of your head that are available to him to put in Windows.

Your Panasonic FZ45 takes fabulous pix. I have an FZ30 and it does, so I know yours does too. Upload some photos here for UHH members to critique and they'll also recommend some post editing techniques for you to try. Cameras aren't perfect and don't always capture what your eye sees in person, no matter what format you are shooting in. Thus your photos seeming to be "dull" isn't an uncommon statement. Compare your photos to the real scene you saw when shooting, not to dramatically edited photos that you didn't see the original of.

tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

Here goes, Bolton Abbey Yorkshire, Friday 3pm, Cloudy dull afternoon.

Bolton Abbey

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Not a very good one to work with because of the overcast sky but here's after I ran it through Dynamic Photo HDR 5 as a pseudo-HDR made out of just one frame. The brisk example took about 2 minutes.

Original


Tweaked a little to overcome dullness

tommckibbin Loc: Liverpool, England.

cannot see any difference here. got to be a computer problem as they look same in picasa and re-installed panasonic software. Both uninstalled now.