Photo colours washing out on laptop/

[Yohan]

First, apologies if this is in the wrong part of the forum, I'm new here and couldn't find anywhere else to post.

When I load my photos onto my laptop (using Vista) the colour is insipid and washed out compared to when I load them onto my PC.

I often get a message saying (something along the lines of) Windows is changing your clolour scheme as it is not compatible with another programme. I've found that the incompatible programme is Ulead Video studio. I've uninstalled and still get the same message.

The problem is that if I use the laptop to prepare photos for printing I compensate for the wash out but then they are too dark to print. (Sometimes I don't have access to the PC and need to be make adjustments on laptop, just so I can see the detail).

Photos/colours are fine on PC.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Yohan

[chris-p]

Hi Yohan, welcome to the forums

This is a relatively common problem with laptops as the screens are generally far too bright and don't display that many colours (in comparison to more advanced screens).

The easiest thing to try is to turn down the brightness of your laptop screen and see if it helps at all. Have a look at this on your laptop and on your PC. For a properly calibrated monitor you should be able to see a difference between the colour of all the grey wedges across the top and you should be able to see the different shaded boxes in the black and white "i" things.

Try adjusting the brightness and contrast of your monitors so that you can see as many of the different shades as possible. You're never going to see all of them on a laptop and you'll probably never see all of them on a "normal" PC monitor either but it should help...

It also depends on what sort of image files you're using and what software you're viewing the images in.

[Yohan]

Hi Chris, thanks for the welcome and many thanks for the advice and the link. The PC was pretty much spot on and I have been able to get the laptop close. I'm using psd and jpg files mainly and Photoshop, so hopefully this will help (perhaps not with my very basic camera skills but certainly with pre printing work).

Thanks again Chris

[chris-p]

Hi Yohan

It's also worth remembering that if you shoot in RAW your shots won't have any processing applied to them in camera so they can look a litltle flat if you're not used to it.

[andrew_19000]

Add a "hue/saturation" adjustment layer to the image and move the saturation slider to the desired amount.