–UPDATE–
Version 2 of the Lightroom Greyscale Gradient, which allows you to see the ends of the scale more easily, can be found here.
–UPDATE–
If you’re using Lightroom on a standard monitor then you will obviously be carefully calibrating your display every week. However, although you may also be creating a profile on your laptop, we know that a small shift in viewpoint, a change in the angle at which you’re viewing the screen, can alter how colours and tones appear.
So, you know the Identity Plate in Lightroom? It’s the logo in the top panel and you can customise it so that it shows your own logo as a graphic or in text. It’s worth changing that if you’re presenting to clients perhaps, or if you just want a small ego-boost each time you open Lightroom. How about replacing that largely redundant area with something more useful?
I give you… Gavin’s Greyscale Gradient.
This little beauty will show you tonal changes from white to black in 19 stages, allowing you to check that you’re seeing all the tones that you want to be seeing. Cool eh? Better still, I’m making this little gem available to you for free. I should probably have put my logo on it. If you have any other suggestions for how to make practical use of Lightroom’s Identity Plate, drop them into the comments below.
Hi Gavin
Wanting to give a try to your Greyscale Gradient, I tried to download it but it doesn’t seem to work. The download don’t start, even though the link is active.
Thank you for sharing
Best
Hi Marc, it should be OK now. Thanks for letting me know.
Got it
Thanks
Awesome. Brilliant idea. You should be speaking at TED or something.
Really, thanks. Great solution.
(but why did i not think of this!?)
Hi,
Cant get download to work yet in safari but what a great idea. thanks
robert
Thanks gavin, I’ll give this a try
This is one of those ‘doh!’ moments… Thanks!
By the way, do you really calibrate your monitor every week?!
Thanks so much for that, I used to think of opening up a gradiant file to check, but never got around to it. This solves all excuses for laziness =D
Yep, every Monday morning, 9am sharp, I chair a staff meeting where we discuss objectives for the week ahead whilst a member of the tech support team calibrates monitors and verifies the weekend back-ups.
Wow
I recheck my calibration every month, and it’s are that it needs to be calibrated after a month.
Sorry, typo in my previous comment. I obviously mean ‘rare’, and not ‘are’
Yep. Brilliant! Thanks
Hi, Nice idea. I always used a separate grey scale image to get the tilt right.
It might just be my setup but the download when using firefox is a php file. Even dragging image to desktop produces a corrupt image file. Works in chrome and ie though.
Thanks.
Gavin,
As you say, cool eh!
Thanks so much.
Very clever Gavin. Thanks for sharing.
What a great idea. Thanks. jack
Great idea Gavin. I have a suggestion though… The gradient needs something to show the transition at each end. If you have a monitor that doesn’t show the brightest whites or the blackest blacks you won’t know about it unless you count how many bars are visible. So perhaps a black bar at the white end and a white bar at the black end…
[...] Ever work in Lightroom on your laptop and find you just aren’t sure which angle to put your screen at to get the right tonal values in your image? My buddy Gavin Gough has a simple, elegant solution and if you go to his blog you can download a gradient that you can set as your identity plate and you’ll never have to fiddle with the screen again. Check it out HERE. [...]
thank you Gavin…i’ll give it a try
Great idea! Thanks!
Solid Idea. Looks kinda cool too.
Cheers
This is great, and I’m using it now. Just one (maybe stupid) question. The very last, 19th, rectangle on the jpg: is it “very dark gray” or is it black (to be matched to the lightroom top bar? I’m assuming very dark gray, but never hurts to ask
Thanks.Very Cool
I cannot right click the link to save the image.
Then when i click the link and go to the page, if i right click and try to save image it tries to download the .php page.
I had to copy image and paste into new file in photoshop and save as jpg.
Gosh, sorry Ken. I guess the right-click is disabled for images. Did you try clicking on the link below the image (http://www.gavingough.com/wp-content/uploads//2009/07/LR-Greyscale.jpg)? That will take you to a jpeg that you should be able to download.
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Great idea, definitely one of those d’oh moments.
Very useful if you are using Lightroom at home in a room where the ambient brightness changes a lot.
One slight modification I have made was add a series of 2px high grey tick marks at the top, so I could be sure I was seeing each of the 19 levels
I did everything and it seems to have loaded as it showed in the Identity plate setup but it does not show up in LR. I tried restarting a few times. Any tips or help??? thanks for your time.
Fantastic! Thanks for make this available to us. Can I use this on my blog hooter with link to this page?
Thanks, Gavin! I agree with Sean up above – I put a white bar on the far right side so I knew where the darks ended. Without it, I found it hard to tell if my viewing angle was a bit too dark.
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I added a black to white gradient border around the outside so I know which sections I can’t see. When I first installed it, the last two black sections were indistinguishable, and I didn’t know the end one was there.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please check the top of this post for a link to VERSION 2.0 of the Greyscale Gradient. Thanks.
I’d like to download this, but the link is not active. How can I get the link to download? thanks
Hi Iswan, the link should be working now. Don’t forget to check-out version 2.0 at http://www.gavingough.com/2009/08/lightroom-gavins-greyscale-gradient-v2-0/
[...] Wer Lightroom benutzt, weiss vielleicht auch das mein die Identity Plate anpassen kann. Was das ist? Die Leiste oben, wo Lightroom steht. Gavin hatte ein klasse Idee. Er hat eine Grauskala gemacht, die man als Identity Plate nutzen kann, so sollte man jetzt gleich alle Helligkeiten sehen. Zum Download geht es hier. Es gibt auch schon eine 2. Version, die ich fast besser finde: Gavin’s Greyscale Gradient – a greyscale plug-in for Lightroom | Gavin Gough: Travel Ph…. [...]
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