Finally had swept up my new frontispiece to my satisfaction. Last night, it'd had one issue that I needed to back away to figure out. (Needed a Black channel, and I don't use them much anymore, so it didn't occur to me at first.) So tonight, I came home and fixed it. Ah, looks so glorious on my huge 37" television screen, which, of course, I bought for Photoshop, not for television.
The problem is that the LCD TVs play by different rules than LCD monitors, and completely defy all the monitor calibration utilities I've relied upon.
But I've been managing to get the tone right on the big screen, and then tweak out some red-imbalance on my little iMac. (Notably, I've only got one license for Photoshop, so firing it up on the iMac means quitting on the Mini. And also notably, the Mini has 4GB of RAM, as opposed to the iMac's 1.5. So any Photoshop on the iMac is a real hassle, especially since I have it tied up with other ongoing projects, like everything necessary for these web updates.)
But for some reason, the last two images I've been working this week (Yesteryear and All You Birds and Bees...) have delivered absolute MUD to my iMac, not only in color, but also in tone. Tweaking color on the iMac (and its limited RAM) is one thing - my color is usually only four or five layers thick, so I flatten the tone on the Mini and transfer it over with its color stack still broken out. But my tone is usually about twenty layers thick.
This is especially maddening because something seems to have changed, and I can't imagine what it was. A week earlier, I developed Never Before (which you haven't seen yet because it is soooo special), and its tone came over to the iMac fabulously. (And I developed that one from scratch too - there was no prior work from the iMac within it, unlike half of everything I've posted lately.)
So pardon me for venting, but it is really upsetting. I didn't buy that 37" screen not to use it for Photoshop. (And the developer of my favorite calibration utility is buried under other projects for the time being.) The worst thing is: what changed in my set-up? I can't damn imagine. It wasn't ideal before, but it was quite workable.
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