the curse of being a perfectionist is that you’re only very rarely completely and utterly satisfied with your work — read: “never”.  for those who know me, they know i’m rarely satisfied with a photo … i’ll always find something in it to work on, to make it better.

COLOUR is probably the most frustrating aspect in this perfectionist’s workflow.  i take colour very seriously … everything from a $2500 monitor touted to be the best of the best, to running my colour-calibration every two weeks using high-end soft- and hard-ware … checking in frequently with the labs by routinely running test prints … all to give my clients the very best of images.

and so, you can imagine the frustration when — after working long hours perfecting each image in regards to colour and white balance, hue and saturation — that it all goes to hell in a handbasket the second you upload to the Internet.  sure, colours vary from monitor to monitor … not all of us are calibrated, not all of us have the same monitors … but it’s when the colours are so utterly different from browser to browser that i just kinda wanna lose it.

here you see what i’m talking about … on the left is Mozilla Firefox and on the right Explorer.  i, myself, use Firefox, and still find that on some sites the colours of my images are way off … like the main scruffy dog site … very over-saturated.  but hello? Explorer? the entire blog is hyper-saturated and the hue has completely gone off the rails.

so what to do?  i consistently remind clients via the website and the literature i send them that colour varies from monitor to monitor; i encourage them to come to the studio for a consult where they can see the true colours on a calibrated monitor.  of course, with the love of their dog clouding their judgement, maybe they don’t even see it? maybe they don’t care?

still, i do!  i care a lot.  that turquoise sky and orange bulldog are not in my portfolio.  i’m not into hyper-saturated images with unrealistic colours … i work hard for the realistic tones and hues … so it’s very frustrating to see this depth of discrepancy, especially since the Internet — with its vast array of colour management — is the main representation and home of the scruffy dog work.

so … enough kvetching.  maybe black and white is the answer.  🙂