Damien Symonds

No, that's exactly the right thing to do. Flattening would be catastrophic. Never flatten the layers.

Hi Lisa, I've moved this into the Lightroom section, and I hope @Christina Keddie or @Jason will be along to help shortly.

Ok, great. Now, have you tried following the troubleshooting at the end of these instructions? It's not the same version as your calibrator, but the troubleshooting should be roughly the same.

Ok, I feel it's really important to establish the connection between these two statements: And to ask you if you've read this article (particularly the very last paragraph): https://www.damiensymonds.net/2012/01/light-around-your-computer.html

But your original post indicated that you'd edited on your laptop for a length of time before you got the desktop. So did your laptop screen ever match your prints?

Great, thanks. So which screen matches your pro lab prints?

Just to clarify - we're talking about two separate computers here, right? You don't have your desktop screen plugged in to your laptop computer; you actually have a whole separate desktop computer?

Hi Melanie, Yeah, it's very very difficult. The Spyder Elite gives the best control for it, but even then it's not guaranteed by any means. Can you tell me how the screens differ in appearance?

Is it possible to show me a couple of example images? Yeah, definitely try to keep to raw editing only.

In the Options Bar, you have to make sure your gradient is set to "Foreground to Transparent" not "Foreground to Background".

For this particular image, these numbers should work fine, and be fairly easy to mask on, except for immediately adjacent to the calf and wheels. Similar numbers should work for others.

If your images are already reasonably good in terms of their exposure and white balance, you can get results every bit as amazing as raw. But jpeg is far less forgiving than raw, you see. If you have been working in tricky light, and ended up with a set of underexposed or overexposed photos, your results will be MUCH better if they're raw files.

I've just sent you an email.

Hi Piero, You only calibrate in the dark. Immediately after calibration, you turn the lights back up (good light) to check the calibration by comparing your screen to pro lab prints. If you find the screen's brightness isn't correct (either too dark or too bright), you turn the lights off to calibrate again to a different value. Then turn the lights on to check again. Etc. YOU MUST NEVER EDIT IN THE DARK. This is so important.

Thanks, fixed.

Actually, jpeg files are more robust than people think. You can usually edit them every bit as much as any other photo. Unless they are underexposed - the darker they are, the worse the quality. Anyway, to answer your question, generally I'll make white balance adjustments in raw, and maybe some simple tweaks such as Exposure, but mainly I leave it for Photoshop.

Oh, this is SUCH an annoying quirk of the Spyder program. You might have to do this, I'm afraid.

I just updated the link.

As far as I can tell, aae files are Apple's equivalent of xmp files - that is, they are small data files that store the info about your edit of the photo. I know that doesn't help with your actual question, though. I hope Brian will be able to help you with that. I'm curious to know, though, how you feel so sure that you shot those photos in raw format.

Great. Thanks for letting me know.

@Helpmeplease?

Yep, that's better, I reckon. This is great. What's "whoop" mean?

Not software, no. Hardware. An actual device, roughly the size of a mouse or a small point-and-shoot camera, which plugs in to your computer and takes readings from your screen. Have you read this page? I really like Frontier Digital. Some reviews here. Lots of people talk about RGB Digital, but I found their quality a bit disappointing, to be honest. However, I strongly recommend you get test prints from both places, and make your own decision. Remember that you need to do that BEFORE you calibrate your screen. You can't calibrate until you have pro lab prints in your hand.

Hi Melanie, have you done any editing to this photo, or did it come straight out of the camera like this?

Oh yeah, great!!! Am I to assume that you can't make the 21 any less green than this?