Pastel Defender Heliotrope

PASTEL NEWS ARCHIVE
For September 2007

September 12th, 2007

Monitoring Monitors

I've just processed the entirety of To Save Her, altering the gamma of every last strip, both those for online, and the much more detailed (non-shrunken) originals to be used for an eventual book one day. Hundreds and hundreds of images and web pages.

Why?

Because it finally came to my full realization that what I was seeing on my monitor was not what everyone -everyone- else in the world was seeing. I had my monitor set out of sync with the majority of the world.

Oh... goddess. Farg.

You see, it happened like this - such a silly thing really - I live and work mostly at night. I am not a morning person at all, I am a creature of the night, and I've been setting my monitors for years to be comfortable for a really dark room. The brightness is something I turn down, so it does not hurt my eyes over hours and hours, and I crank down the contrast to match, so that the result is a good image that pumps out less light overall. Oops.

Most people just go with the factory settings for their monitors, or near to that setting, which is universally arranged for a daytime user with some ambient light around them, such as, say, daylight. Or overhead lighting. Or candles or whatever. Light. I sit in a dark room with only one little ambient source up in a corner.

The result is that my 'film noir' style of art in To Save Her looks like a washed out watercolor on every monitor I have checked beyond my own. No dark shadows, no deep greys and blacks... just pale, light, diffuse greys and whites. Not the effect I want at all, and not good in any respect.

So, finally, encompassing the enormity of this, I set about correcting my entire body of To Save Her work, at least the strips and book components. I don't want to contemplate having to deal with converting and repackaging all the desktops. Gah.

And there is the matter of, well, every bloody thing else I have ever done for the past five years or so. Pastel Defender Heliotrope, Impossible Things, even my Warhammer and Toymallet work. It is just overwhelming.

I think I can let those things slide... after all Pastel is called... Pastel.

Then again, some of the pages just look washed out to me now, with my new monitor settings. Another day of massaging art and web pages?

I'll have to really think about that one.

PASTEL DEFENDER HELIOTROPE
By Jennifer Diane Reitz

A Part Of Jenniverse.com

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