Nikon Digital Mess?

Question

I have a custom-made PC with a 146 gig hard drive and 3.25 gigs of ram, and am using PS 11.01 as part of CS4 Extended. And I think I've made a mess--maybe not.
I recently acquired a Nikon D90, and with it I shot some 450 frames of an outdoor show in Raw + fine. Instead of using the Nikon software, I imported them all into PS, reduced their physical size, and saved the reductions as TIFS for further editing. Eventually, I thought to convert them to JPEGS at 72 dpi for the customer's on-line slideshow. (This is how I've always done things with scanned film and slides.)
My 450 TIFS all have a slight magenta cast. I called Nikon tech support, and they told me that as long as I didn't do any color correction to them, my final products would be without a magenta cast on my client's computer. However, when I copied a few of the files to my laptop, they turned out to have a heavy magenta cast.
Is there anything that I can do to save the 450 TIFS, or should I just start all over again and import with the Nikon software?
Karla

Answer 1

Karla,
I concur with your final assessment that your monitors are out of calibration...I seem to recall that those folks who have posted here of issues with color shifts toward magenta, have often found that the monitor calibration was the issue. Why a magenta or reddish bias is common, I'm not sure, but at least it seems you're on the right track, and I hope you have a colorimeter for performing a hardware-based calibration of your monitors. If not, then you'd be well-rewarded over time if you purchased one. In lieu of a colorimeter, a software-only calibration can also be performed and is better than nothing at all. I don't know what to recommend in this latter category, but a search on Google might steer you in a good direction. I'm guessing however that even a budget-oriented colorimeter such as the Pantone Huey will still provide a better calibration than a software-only solution.
With regard to your comment of "you should give me more credit for sense and experience", I'd just like to offer a few thoughts: Firstly, while your post is well-written and reflects an intelligent mind, there isn't really much here to go on to gauge your actual experience level. Consequently, people are often left to reply in context with what they read rather than make any assumptions one way or another. Better (my opinion) to understimate your experience and say too much than to overestimate and say too little, thus begging a continued Q&A series of posts. Second, if you feel the information provided is at a level that someone of your "sense and experience" should already be aware of, please keep in mind that these forums serve as an educational tool for all who might search for similar topics in their own troubleshooting efforts. As such, if other forum users respond to some questions with more information or detail than seems warranted to you, it may well be for the benefit of those less knowledgeable than you who discover this (or any other) thread.
Also, regarding a laptop's color versus that of a monitor, something I am guessing you do know is that laptop LCDs often provide very little control over their color response, short of using whatever color management/adjustment controls are provided in the graphics chipset driver. My own experience has been that such software is very touchy, and thus rather difficult to use. Combine that with what are often no visibly indexed brightness or contrast adjustments and that just makes matters worse. I think laptops...with reasonably good LCD screens...are where hardware calibration is especially useful, as they can be used in a mode of calibrating the screen from an "as is" state, building a profile that will in turn yield a more correct color rendering by color-managed applications such as Photoshop.
cheers,
Daryl