Color Fidelity

Monitor Color

The image you are looking at on a computer monitor or television screen has a noticeably different color cast from the color of the original image or object.

Here are some things that can affect the color you are seeing:

• Different monitors have different color casts. This varies with the manufacturer and the age of the monitor.
  
  
• The Designer did not use web safe colors.
  
  
• Computers that run under a Windows operating system use a different system color palette than that used in Macintoshes. When one type of computer tries to compensate for colors in an image that it doesn't have, it substitutes and/or dithers colors it does have to simulate colors it does not have. This can cause unintended color shifts.
  
  
• The default gamma setting of Macintosh monitors is brighter than that of monitors for Windows machines. therefore: Images optimized for the Macintosh will look dark on a Windows/Intel machine, and those optimized for "Wintel" computers will look light on a "Mac".
  
  
• Background and ambient lighting can affect the way your eyes see color.
  
  
• Fatigue and medication can affect color perception.
  
  
• The inaccuracies that you see may be the result of either a bad scan of a good image, or a good scan of a poor image.
  
  
• Monitors are capable of creating more intense colors than what we see in the real world. For a more detailed explanation click here to see CMYK vs. RGB (subtractive color vs. additive color).