Damien Symonds

Yeah, gosh, the pixels of the screen must be very small to fit 3200 of them across. How does it look now that you've made it 1600?

Hi Lauren, please read this first, then we'll discuss further.

Are the blacks so black because you like it that way, or because they can't be recovered in raw? For your blending to work best (yes, that was going to be my suggestion) you'll need little or no black clipping in raw.

It's a raw file, I assume?

I'm pretty sure my wife uses VLC for these.

Alas, I don't know of an easy way, sorry. It might be necessary to entirely reset PSE's preferences. To do so, simply hold down Ctrl Alt Shift as you launch it.

"Extracting" is impossible, so abandon any thought of that. The best you could hope for is to change the background to another very similar, very dark colour.

The inverted one, I'd say, as long as it's 16-bit.

Monitor calibration instructions

Yes, we really need to establish that your screen/calibration isn't the problem here.

Because in the absence of a monitor profile on your computer, telling all software exactly how to render photos, each software has to guess. If they guess differently, this is the result.

Well, it's one of those inverse-correlation things, you know? The more effort you put into getting the lighting right when you shoot, the less effort is required in post-processing; and vice versa. While it goes without saying that it would be reckless to just take a normal everyday photo of a belly and rely on some very advanced editing skills to turn it into this afterwards, I think it's also true to say that it would be unreasonable to expect to nail this perfectly in camera. Some editing will be involved. Because there is no hair in the photo, you don't need to worry about a black background when you're shooting. That can be easily dropped in in Photoshop. So when you're shooting, concentrate on the subject herself. Shadows in front, and that nice rim lighting. As long as you have shadows in the right places, you can darken them further later, so don't get hung up on making them fully black in camera. That's what Levels is for. Hope this helps. Once you take the Levels Class, a lot more about this will be clearer to you.

*shrugs* Not really. The answer is the last line of this screenshot:

And have you tried this comparison on both?

You cropped off the important part of the screenshot. We needed to see the document profile down the bottom. Also, I need to know about your computer setup. How many screens are attached to your computer?

Of course your desktop screen must be IPS. Angles aren't a problem with IPS.

Is this a new problem? I mean, were they matching before?

Can you get out your test prints and make sure your screen really is still ok?

Did you also try the next lowest? Yes, my thinking exactly.

Anyway, this looks very promising. Can you do a couple of things for me? First, go to Edit>Assign Profile, and change from Generic RGB to sRGB. Then, add a Levels adjustment layer, and Alt-click on the "Auto" button in the Levels dialog. Make sure it's set to "Enhance per channel contrast", and set the shadows and highlights clipping to 0.01% each. Click "Save as defaults" then hit OK. Save that (keeping it as a tiff is fine, or change to psd, either way is ok.) Then, show me the photo and the 100% crop again.

Yeah, 64 sure is weird.

That just looks like you cropped the same web sized version. I want a good close crop from the full-sized master file.

Can you tell us the details of the monitor?

Well, go in and out of QM, I guess?

Thanks! I think you said it was a tiff file. Is it 8-bit or 16-bit?