Problems with colors/color calibration and editing

[SCoombs]

My monitor is calibrated. I have calibrated it using the latest Calibrite Display Pro. I've run it through both Calibrite's own software, which actually seemed buggy and was hard to get to finish, as well as DisplayCal, which worked well. Because Calibrite's software really didn't work (on my Windows 10 computer) I am using DisplayCal's.

Now working in Lightroom and Photoshop, things looks good. When opening exported photos in Windows, they don't look the same, about which Calibrite's FAQs says:

"Windows picture viewer and some web applications do not fully support Color Management systems. Some of the applications do not support the latest ICC profiling corrections and due to this the images appear darker than normal."

Of course I am not using Calibrite's profile and DisplayCal gives me a file that is .icm, not .icc, but I don't really care that much if Windows Photo viewer is displaying my photos according to my monitor's calibration, so I haven't worried about it.

Two problems arise, though. First is that when I am printing to the print lab, I am getting results that look a lot more similar to what Windows photo viewer shows than what I see in Lightroom or Photoshop. Everything is printing really a lot greener than it looks in PS/LR with my calibrated monitor. This is true even for very "controlled" photos where I haven't done any color editing but have simply taken what the camera gave, like photos lit with flash and white balanced to flash. and then not doing much more to it. I am exporting with the sRGB profile embedded as I understand to be the proper procedure. This is becoming a bit of a problem as I am doing more professional work for sports teams, etc.

The second problem is a matter of photos that are going to be viewed electronically like on a website. If they look good in Photoshop/Lightoom/Dxo/whatever application which properly understands the calibration's color profile, but then they look badly wrong wrong when viewed on other devices that are not calibrated in the same way, that's a problem!

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Here's one I'm working on. In LR/Photoshop, it looks correct. When I look at it here, the contrast is different. The bright parts are slightly brighter and the darks darker so that the photo, while looking okay, is really just not what it is supposed to be and what it looks like when editing. This one is really not that bad, too: there are others that wind up looking a lot worse "in the wild" then compared to what I see while editing.

The point of calibration is to make sure that what I see on my monitor is as close to "correct" as possible. Yet I'm finding the whole thing to be a large source of stress and it's made me more uncertain about the photos I'm putting out there. Ultimately I'm a bit confused as to what is going on here. The monitor is calibrated - but it's only calibrated for certain applications? This doesn't quite make sense, because with my calibration on all of my applications, the Windows desktop, etc. look different from before - so that must mean that each application is handling the color profile in its own, slightly different way. Regardless, the problem is that it's as if with my my calibrated profile working in Lightroom/Photoshop, I'm editing photos that look correct for that profile, as interpreted by LR/PS, only, so that when anyone NOT using that profile view the photos, they are not looking right.

I must confess that as an extremely technically inclined user this whole thing has me pretty confused and I'm not sure how to sort it out. Thoughts?

 

[SCoombs]

As a related issue that I wanted to add as its own post so as to keep the original post more focused, I'm really pretty confused about my monitor's brightness level. When I started printing my photos through the professional print lab, I encountered issues with the brightness level of the photos. This was not surprising to me - I hadn't managed to get my monitor calibrated yet and so I knew this would be something that needed sorting out. When I got the calibration device, I knew from lots of reading that people say they get their monitors to somewhere between 100-120 nits for printing. A handful of people like to go as low as 80. I had had problems with photos being too dark, so I went with 100 nits. This seemed really overly dark. I went up to 120 and tried that. I worked with that for a few weeks but was finding that I could not get photos that looked properly exposed with this. After working on the photo and getting it as close to looking right as I could, everything would still look far too dark and yet it would be at a point where if I increased anything at all - exposure, highlights, whites - it would start to get far too bright in the bright areas, almost blowing out, and lose all the detail.

I spent hours on everything fine tuning the various brightness/exposure related stuff to an insanely nitpicky amount, dodging and burning specific areas, etc., trying to get things to look workable. It was awful. Then one evening I went out to do some pictures of my kids and had really some really great light on them in the field, only to come back and find they looked awful. I couldn't get them to have any of their natural color, etc. Finally I turned my monitor's brightness up and it was like night and day: now the photos were workable. Now they looked like what I expected. Yet according to the calibration device, I'm at around 200 nits - MUCH brighter than it is supposed to be. However, working with this brightness level I can actually get photos that are well balanced and look correct whereas it was almost impossible when at 120 nits - or even 140, which I tried. And, while I haven't yet printed any that were edited with this brightness, when I compare prints that are of a good looking brightness level to the files on my now ~200 nit monitor, the on screen versions are clearly brighter but they nevertheless share the same "sense" - that is to say, when I look at the print and look at the monitor, it feels like I'm looking at the same photo with the same overall exposure level, etc.

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Here's an example of a photo from the evening I mentioned which with my monitor set to 120 nits looked absolutely unworkable. Her skin looked either overly shadowed as though she'd been standing with a black wall right on her face (in spite of the camera's meter saying the exposure was spot on) or it looked pale white, almost like a Geisha - if I tried to increase the exposure or highlights or whites to the point that the photo didn't look like it was taken in deep shade.