Hey there gang,

I have a friend that makes movies. To me his work is too bright and over saturated. It almost kills my eyes looking at it. He tells me that that is the "correct" way video and graphics should look if your monitor is set up with the proper Lookup Tables and color calibration.  He's running a very new IMac and I run a PC with an older Samsung monitor. I've also tried to calibrate my monitor and use the right ICC profile for it.

I just can't get past his images and video. Very harsh/bright/over saturated compared to EVERYTHING I see on the internet and my own output. Despite this he claims that My output looks off. 

I did a render that was pretty flat and did some color correction and increased the saturation and brightness. I then sent the original UN-altered image to him and had him do the same to what he thought was right. Here are the two images. Which looks right to you? Are you on a modern Mac? Are you using a color compensated monitor? Which image looks correct on an IOS device or Galaxy? (I'm told that these devices DO have correct color output)

I'm being told that what I see on my monitor is NOT correct and that his output and treatment of the image is how it should be to look correct if someone is using calibrated hardware.

here is the image. I'm not saying who's is who's interpretation.

They both look off to me but the bottom one is the better of the two.  Not as much contrast, more graduation between shades, shadows not overwhelming.  But, IMO, it has an overall pink cast.

I'm on an ancient PC with a Samsung 4K monitor, setup with its own profile in Win7.

Lower one looks more natural.

(iMac mid 2015)

The bottom one looks right. And if I had to guess, I'd say it's yours. My experience with calibrating monitors is that it looks good for the calibration image but everything else looks like crap, probably because most stuff is made with monitors that are either calibrated differently or not at all.

I'm on a new PC with a new card that I'm still trying to get calibrated how I like it. Seems to change with every app.

I don't know how to describe my PC monitor, except:

From what I can see (caveat: I'm no artist), the top model looks too bright and more denoised than the bottom one. Whereas the top model looks too beige, the bottom model looks too pink. The stark white background dulls out the bottom model, but the in the top pic, the bright light on the model tries to compensate for the white background and uses too much contrast to over-compensate.

Of course, you just have to look in my gallery to know I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just calling it like I see it through my monitor and graphics card.

A lot of detail is being lost in the top image and it is overall warmer than the bottom image.  I would agree that the second image is more natural-looking to the eye.  Quite some time ago when I was researching Gamma correction to understand it better, I came across posts that MACs have a different Gc than PC video output.  IIRC, Gc for a MAC was 1.5 as opposed to 2.2.  This was quite some time ago and I don't know if this has been standardized since then and if it has any bearing on monitor calibration.  FWIW, that top image is exhibiting clipping on the bright end of its output.  As I mentioned, you're losing detail in your shadows and blowing out the highlights.  Technically correct does not necessarily mean visually pleasing to the human eye.  That's why there is post-production.

My monitors are calibrated, and the bottom picture looks correct for me. I've got the same feeling on my Samsung Note10+.

On my Asus monitor I prefer the top, but on my samsung galaxy tablet I prefer the bottom.

Overall, the bottom one looks more natural on my brand new 16" MacBook Pro with a Liquid Retina XDR Display set to the default profile for the display. But it has a fair amount of noise, which makes the skin tones hard to compare, and it has a pinkish cast, as others have noted. The shadows, makeup, and eyebrows are too dark on the top one but perhaps not dark enough on the bottom one. 

When I switched from a 2019 MacBook Pro to my current one, I noticed that all the renders I had "in progress" and not yet shared seemed to be not bright enough, so I've been adding curves adjustments in Photoshop to brighten them before posting them. But of course I have no way of knowing how they look to other people! I use the sRGB color space in Photoshop since all my work is designed to be uploaded to the web, but even then, what looks right in Photoshop doesn't always look right on the web.

The biggest difference I've noticed when viewing other people's renders on my new MBP is that smaller renders look even more low-res, but that's more of a lack of sharpness than a brightness or color thing.

=P

Yes, second image was mine. I will agree that it's a bit on the pink/red side. I was starting to believe my friend that somehow people were not seeing the same image I was on my monitor. There is a little room for pushing saturation but not to the levels he does. Thanks for all the feedback. And =P back at you TK. lol

@ TwiztidKidd: OMG, a cry for attention!  Don't you have any shame?  LOL!