Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Gamma Problems

First of all, no, this has noth­ing to do with the Incred­i­ble Hulk — I spent a good deal of time this week­end revis­it­ing the site design for Web­graph, which has been sit­ting idle in my hard drive for too long. I’ve had the basic design com­pleted since the begin­ning of the year (!), so I decided to start test­ing the col­ors on dif­fer­ent sys­tems before I con­sider the scheme (and the exact shades) final­ized, and this is where I start to run into prob­lems: I’ve dealt with gamma issues before (PC’s and Mac’s have dif­fer­ent gamma set­tings, which cause col­ors to dis­play dif­fer­ently between plat­forms, and even between dif­fer­ent mon­i­tors if they’ve been cal­i­brated), but I can’t recall ever see­ing as much of a dif­fer­ence as I am with this par­tic­u­lar case.

To illus­trate the prob­lem, I’ve cre­ated an exam­ple (view test image) show­ing what I con­sider to be the accept­able vari­a­tions in shades of black (con­cen­trate on the nav bar, behind the words “Home, Our Work” etc.) between the top and bot­tom bor­ders, the solid back­ground, and the diag­o­nal pat­tern (all shades of black). If you are view­ing this on a PC, you might not see the pat­tern, or the top and bot­tom bor­ders. This is the problem.

On the desk­top PC’s here (the prob­lem does not occur on our Dell lap­top, because LCD dis­plays do not gen­er­ally share the same gamma prob­lems as CRT’s) the entire area from top bor­der to bot­tom bor­der (except the white let­ter­ing) looks black. No pat­tern, no dif­fer­ence between the bor­ders and the back­ground. On our Mac’s (some of them cal­i­brated, oth­ers straight out of the box, all CRT) the dif­fer­ence in shades is clearly visible.

The prob­lem is this: when I change the shades so they show up as sub­tle dif­fer­ences on the PC’s, it is so incred­i­bly light on the Mac’s as to make it look stupid.

Aside from any ideas (which are most wel­come), I would like to use you, my val­ued reader, as a test user: please post your review of the above test image in the com­ments of this post, and include your test­ing envi­ron­ment (OS, browser, type of mon­i­tor, color depth, cal­i­brated or not, gamma set­ting if known) and let me know which of the vari­a­tions you pre­fer (or none, if you can­not see the pat­tern at all).

I really appre­ci­ate your help, and if you can assist with an direct solu­tion, I’ll include a com­ment in the final site’s HTML list­ing you as a con­trib­u­tor, and link­ing to your site.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, July 21st, 2003.

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