Technical Tips

Monitor profile

When you view a product photography image on a web page, what you actually see is partly determined by a profile controlling the brightness, contrast and colour balance of your monitor or screen.

If your monitor profile is old or incorrectly set, your images may not look right, making you think that they are in need some image adjustments before you upload them to your web site. For example if your monitor is a bit too dark and the colour balance is leaning towards blue you may be tempted to lighten your images and warm the pictures up with a bit of yellow to cancel out the blue cast.

When you later view your web page using the same monitor as you adjusted the images on everything will look fine. But if you view it on a correctly profiled monitor your adjusted images will appear too bright and a bit to yellow because the adjustments did not need to be made.

Now you obviously can’t control what your visitors use to view your web site. All you can assume is that the majority will be using devices which are set to their default and fairly close to accurate. Therefore if you profile your monitor correctly, your images should look great in the majority of circumstances.

It is also worth noting that image appearance can vary not only with monitor profile but also depending on the computer platform, device used, operating system, browser selection, monitor quality and brand. However unless the image presentation is really critical these elements should not effect you as long as you have profiled your own monitor correctly to start with.