Prints on the wall vs images on the screen

[retinax]

They look good on the screen but when compared to the print, the screen image looks like crap.

Ok sure, I've never considered the screen as a final presentation medium for fine art, for documentary work it has been for better or worse for a long time of course - most of us look at newspapers and photo features online.

It is mostly fine for editing, critique, looking at others' work for inspiration...


Progress has been pretty fast in this regard, in the last couple years phones and tablets have got very decent screens... some competition for photo books (which don't always have great print quality, either), perhaps, but certainly not for the print on the wall.

 

[olifaunt]

One of my points here is that a screen image only looks good for quick, cursory viewing. It encourages the viewer to look and move on. A printed image can hold your attention and invite close inspection and study. At least that's how I see it. That's one of the reasons why, when compared to a good printed image, the online screen image looks like crap.

I look at image on screen for a long time sometimes. It is not cursory for me.

I don't quite see why what you say needs to be the case though. Do you have a high-resolution retina-type screen (whose pixels are too small to see) whose color calibration is up to date? (One needs to recalibrate typical monitors every few months with special software/hardware.) Is it a high-gamut screen? Are you maybe looking at the images only in sRGB instead of a larger gamut space? Is the screen much smaller than your prints maybe? Do you have an ICC-profile-aware viewer? Does the viewer not allow you to fill the entire screen with the image without borders or menu bars? Is you screen somewhere without a bright or distracting background and without reflections?

For color work, screens are more like slide projectors, which are usually considered a better way of viewing slides with than via prints. You can approximate prints by turning the brightness way down.

Film scans often don't have the full dynamic range and detail you can get out in prints, they can have a different curve, they can have sharpening turned on (a pet peeve of mine) causing artifacts, and can emphasize grain that prints tend to smooth out. Te color profile or correction of the scan may be wrong or different. But one can do better scanning in that case.

That is easier said than done; I have been known to post pictures taken with a digital camera of darkroom prints instead of posting scans of the same image, because even the picture of the print was better than the direct scan of the negative.

 

[Michael Markey]

For color work, screens are more like slide projectors, which are usually considered a better way of viewing slides with than via prints.

I think that`s the reason why I prefer screens .
For thirty years I shot nothing but slide film .
Had a brief hiatus and picked up again twelve years ago ,again with slide film and a Leica projector.
Never really got into prints .

 

[icebear]

Nothing better than a good rant.

I hear you though. A lot of folks don't really put an effort into processing before posting images. These are really small, starting from in-camera jpgs and most folks use the same software with the same presets. Not surprisingly a lot of stuff has the same "look" and if you don't like that, all looks like crap.

If you have a carefully calibrated monitor ( a glossy retina screen supposedly isn't the best choice for image processing) and carefully adjust your image how you like it, there should be no reason that the posted image later looks like crap by default.

I agree that a monitor image doesn't even hold a candle to a large high end print (e.g. 24x36" ConeEdition Piezography on Hahnemuhle FA Baryta). I have a few images that I tought might be worth printing but to have the physical print infront of me, almost knocked me out. What a difference.

 

[jvo]

prints will continue to shrink in their use... digital images will continue to increase if only because it is easier and more ubiquitous. they will also improve.


having said that, i believe the end result of photography is the print.... especially as the number of prints shrink. it will also become a measure of what the artist thought of his or her work - valued/important enough to go through the "labor" of producing it. it may, or may not, be "better", just that the artist thought it so.

 

[Out to Lunch]

Eventually, all information will be shared digitally. Within my lifetime, it will be 5G and who knows what will happen after that. In the meantime, lets hope that we'll take better care of planet earth.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

In the meantime, lets hope that we'll take better care of planet earth.

It means no consumerism and population grow.

While G5 and after it, will not stimulate population, but consumerism for sure.
My iPhone 4c is still better than any newer phone and our two old iPads works fine.
I'm typing it from one of them now.

 

[willie_901]

...
Maybe I'm lucky with an iMac that's been pretty accurate color-wise for the better part of a decade, but images look great, if different than on paper. As for the iPad, at least the Retina models, it's gorgeous for display. I've been trying my hand at editing on mobile and the workflow isn't exactly intuitive but there's no want for quality.

Load a few TIFFs onto it and you've got a very nice dynamic portfolio.

...

I have found a 27" Apple Cinema Display does an excellent job with a reasonable amount of color management. I'm very pleased with monochrome rendering as well. I do all my printing using commercial labs and I just follow their file preparation directions. Honestly, I have never had an issue with color fidelity or tonal rendering. However, it takes a lot of work to go from a color negative to an optimized JPEG or TIFF image. I have never used an out-of-camera JPEG or semi-automated scan image for a print.

I recently started to display my photos on a 60" VIZIO TV (2160 pixels). Using LR Classic CC high-quality JPEGs (sRGB IEC61966-2.1). I stayed entirely within the Apple eco-system. Sets of images are streamed in real-time from my iCloud account using a Gen. 4 Apple TV following standard OS X and tvOS procedures. At a reasonable viewing distance (~ 6 ft) the results are surprisingly good. They certainly don't "look like crap[/I"] unless the source negative or raw file is crap.

No digital display can possibly have the same aesthetic as a physical print. Very different digital technologies could negate this conclusion sometime in the future. But right now

 

[Out to Lunch]

It means no consumerism and population grow.

While G5 and after it, will not stimulate population, but consumerism for sure.
My iPhone 4c is still better than any newer phone and our two old iPads works fine.
I'm typing it from one of them now.

Who knows... Let's hope our children will do better than we are doing today.

 

[Steve M.]

There's a disconnect between the quality of an online image and how much someone likes it, at least on this forum anyway. There have been so many, many really lousy shots praised to high heaven because they were taken w/ a fanboy favorite camera or lens. What I'm saying is, who cares what someone else thinks about a photo? There is obviously little to no value in something like that. If I gave any credence to what strangers said about my work, nothing would ever get done. And that's still the thing...... there's making the image, and there's talking about it. Photographic prints have become passe? Hardly.

Thanks for a good early morning rant though! It gets the brain moving a little faster.