My entire last week has been an exercise in futility from a photography standpoint. As I had posted last weekend, I was building myself a light box to improve the quality of my photographs. My KP-IDP socks were finished, so I could get my pics taken, and have them shipped off before the kids started spring break... or so I thought!
If there was a mistake that could be made, I made it! My first testing of the light box was with light yellow yarn with a white background. My camera over-compensated, and I ended up with too-dark pictures. My camera is far from the easiest to adjust, but I managed to figure out how to get it to work a bit better. Then I decided to start working on the socks. No matter what I did, they looked HORRIBLE!! Even though my LCD display on my camera seemed okay, when I would get the images loaded on my computer, craptastic would have been an improvement! I spent TWO FULL DAYS playing around with every single setting on my camera for colour, as well as colour correction software on the computer and online. I was crabbing because even my phone got the colour closer than my camera did, or so I thought. I even had a picture of my computer that I sent to my BFF that showed the colour differences... the yarn balls perched on the laptop, with one of the pictures I had taken loaded on the monitor... and even in a tiny picture viewed on a phone, the difference was blatantly apparent.
It wasn't until Friday that I discovered the real culprit, and no, it wasn't (entirely) operator error. It was my monitor of all things! Like I said, I had been using the leftover balls beside my monitor to try and correct the colour on my images... much easier to try and colour match when you have the actual yarn right beside it! I had heard on Rav that the pictures in the KP catalogue, and the web site weren't all that bad. I went to the site and grabbed a large thumbnail of the yarn I was sent. I loaded it up beside the picture I had taken of my socks, and still had the yarn sitting there in front. Imagine my surprise when I discover that the colour from the KP site nearly matched my photo perfectly, which of course meant that it was nowhere near the actual yarn I had in front of me!
So that all started the weekend's exercise in futility... trying to fix the colour on my monitor. Many, MANY posts on Ravelry to various forums, plenty of Googling, and tons of playing around with my display settings was my main task this past weekend. All of this to discover that it appears I can not fix my laptop's colour. There is nothing in the control panel that lets me actually adjust it... just some other settings that are either okay (brightness), or I can't fix the way they say (gamma). I am going to have to come up with a series of workarounds for this since a new computer, new second monitor, new imaging software, and the like, simply are not in the budget right now, or for the foreseeable future!!!
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