Mmm, icons

[triskellian]

Last night, I uploaded my fiftieth icon <points at icon>. Well, it's actually my more-than-fiftieth, because I've had others that I've abandoned, but it fills my last icon slot, which is a sad thing in a way, although there are a few of my existing icons that I don't much like, and will be happy to ditch when the time comes.

But this rambling sort of has a point. I made this icon on my laptop (flat screen, Mac), on which the colours and brightness look fine. Now, on my work puter (CRT, PC), it's far too dark, so I need to know how it looks to you guys...

[Poll #303301]
Hmmm. Some people use polls all the time, and seem to consider them the killer app for paid accounts. This is probably only my second or third poll ever - icons are the killer app for me, all the way ;-)

Comments

Gamma

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I've never really understood the logic behind all that cr*p actually.

To my way of thinking, there is a unique correct way for a monitor to display a picture with a certain set of RGB parameters (for a fixed position of the monitor's twiddly knobs). Gamma corrections on a given platform are there to fix this, not to get creative with the settings.

The whole point of all this being that you should be able to save a picture on one system and have it look pretty much exactly the same on another. (And when this fails, at least one system has its gamma set wrong.)

Ian always claimed otherwise, but was never able to satisfactorily explain to me why not.

Re: Gamma

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

The only satisfactory excuses I've ever heard are that gamma correction used to be quite expensive, and that computers can't measure the gamma of the screen they're attached to. But even the second of those ought to have been fixable with PnP. Beyond that, all I can think is that if someone is used to a value, they'll get confused if it changes.

So yes, it basically sucks in that printers have a gamma of 1, so a monitor with anything other than that makes things tricky. And woe betide if your monitor has different gamma values for different phosphor colours. But since most graphics setups can't apply a variable correction, we're basically stuck with it.