How long has it been since I’ve put up some photo wallpapers? More than a year, that’s how long. Looking back at my old stuff, it’s a bit odd how not only my style and preferences have changed, but I’ve also completely forgotten how I got some of those older shots. Anyway, here’s a few pictures that I like that are suitable for use as wallpaper. My site stats and my own experience in shopping for a new monitor tell me that a great many people now use 16:9 aspect ratio displays, so I’ve made wallpapers in that proportion as well as the 4:3 and 16:10 wallpapers that I usually make.
Recent Reviews
Kasane Minazumi Hanikami, Kanojo wa Koi o Suru
Colidis The Art of Citemer Liu
Chizuru Mizuhara Rent-a-Girlfriend
Honolulu Azur Lane
Baltimore Azur Lane
St. Louis Azur Lane
Lucia Punishing: Gray Raven
Asuka Langley Shikinami Neon Genesis Evangelion
Princess KatiaNSFW Honey Cage
CecilNSFW Elf Village
Gotou and Rin are outstanding shots with Rin probably being my favourite work of yours so far. Even if it may be a minority, it would be great to see future wallpaper shots in 2560×1440 / 2560×1600 as well.
Thanks! Yeah, I might start doing stuff at larger resolutions soon. I’m looking around for a 27″ or a 30″ monitor, since I do a lot of photo editing these days and my current monitor isn’t that fantastic. Looking at prices, I’m thinking a 27″ display is more realistic.
Make sure you get an IPS monitor so you can get accurate color (AdobeRGB instead of sRGB). A nice monitor for you would be a 27″ Dell Ultrasharp U2711. They are $999 new but you can look around and get them for as low as $650.
If you need bigger, go with a Dell U3011, it has a res of 2560 x 1600 and costs $1399 new, but some Craigslist and ebay scouring can net you one for $850
I have the 23″ version of the above mentioned monitors, and the color blows standard monitors away. Just be forewarned that an IPS monitor will be slower during gaming….they usually have scalers, which slows everything down in the name of accuracy.
And keep the wallpaper coming!!!
That Rin pic is one of the best I have ever seen. It is currently my wallpaper on my aforementioned 23″ :p
Yeah, I’d only be looking at IPS panels. The one I was looking at was a Hewlett Packard panel, I think it’s the ZR30 or something like that. It’s kinda spendy, though. I’ve got a Dell 2408WFP right now and it’s okay now, but when I got it it had a hideous green color cast that I couldn’t get rid of until I bought a calibration device. It also has a couple of odd dark spots near the middle of the screen, each of which is about the size of a nickel, and they’re kinda bothersome. Add to that that my last monitor was also a Dell which had its share of problems (it often displayed a strange green crawling-dot pattern, and the power supply nearly caught on fire one time) and I’m thinking I may try a different manufacturer for my next monitor.
Ah. Sounds like you’ve been unlucky heh. I saw a used ZR30 for $499 on CL. I forgot that you live not far from me, ill keep a lookout for a good deal, if I find one, ill let you know. As I already have a 23″ and a 28″, I don’t need a 30″, so I didn’t buy it. But it’s already been claimed. There was an Apple 30 Cinema Display for $699 on CL as well.
Yeah, it’s sort of peculiar. I seem to have bad luck with certain types of devices. I had a Gameboy and a Game Gear and both broke for no apparent reason, and I’m really leery about handheld consoles now (though I plan to pick up a PSP soon). For some reason, almost every CD burner I’ve owned has malfunctioned, starting with the 4x Hewlett Packard CD-R drive I got for Christmas back in 1998. And I’ve had bad luck with Dell displays. It’s sort of a shame since I really liked the 2001FP up until it started to die; it was a huge, huge step up from the old 19″ Dell CRT I had been using.
You should definitely go with either HP or Dell for IPS panels, it’s too bad you’ve been unlucky with Dell in the past. I’ve used both the Dell U2711 and U3011 and been very pleased with both.
While Phil (correctly) mentions AdobeRGB over sRGB, do note that some browsers are unable to render images with certain embedded color profiles. Google Chrome is the biggest culprit here and it’s insanely annoying. I found out the hard way while browsing my own shots and many of them looked horribly washed out. Instead of telling Chrome users to switch to a proper browser I changed color space in Photoshop to make up for the flaw.
Well to be fair both monitors can be run in sRGB, you will have dithering though.
I think both of those displays will still be candidates when I go looking for a new display, although I may also just get another 24″ monitor if I decide the money isn’t there for a bigger monitor. I’m kinda inclined to splurge though, since I spend a ton of time looking at my monitor, monitors tend to last a while, and I spend a lot of time working with my pictures. At any rate, I probably won’t be looking around for a new one until sometime next year; hopefully prices drop a bit on the bigger screens.
I must admit that for somebody who runs a photo-based website, I am woefully ignorant of the importance of color spaces. I’ve got my camera set to Adobe RGB, mostly because I read that it was a good idea in one of the Joe McNally books I bought, but I think the image gets converted to sRGB when I export the RAW file to a TIFF. I think I have a similar problem to what you encountered, though; ever since I bought a Spyder 3 calibration device, my pictures look horribly desaturated in Photoshop. I can turn off the calibrated profile, but then Windows reverts the display to the monitor default with the really ugly green cast. I figured out a workaround where I load the Spyder 3 color profile upon rebooting, then switch to an sRGB profile under the Color Management pane. I get nice colors in Windows and my pictures look nice in Photoshop. It seems like a really ass-backwards way to do things and it does kinda bother me to not understand what is going on, but as long as it works, I can’t be too displeased.
Great Job man, thank you, I’ll be adding these to my rotation of wallpapers immediately.
Thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you like them.
Nice one – more awesome 1920×1080 figure wallpapers to add to my pool. Now I can pretend I own beautiful figures such as Dizzy and Saber Alter.
Finding decent walls in 16:9 is a pain, which isn’t helped by most cameras opting for the 16:10. It’s not as bad now as it used to be when HD TVs first launched, most stuff “widescreen” was 16:10 back then.
Since I started using a DSLR I decided I might as well make my own wallpapers too. The added benefit is you get to see your figures up close on your desktop and not just inside a display case.
I didn’t quite realize so many people use 16:9 displays until I started looking around for a new monitor (and maybe a new laptop too) and found that there are almost no 16:10 displays being made. That’s sort of annoying to me since I prefer having the extra vertical space, particularly since I don’t really watch many movies. Most cameras are actually 3:2, which means I often have to crop the top and bottom off of a picture, and I’ve had a few frames that I thought would make for nice wallpapers but I wasn’t too happy with how they looked after cropping.
That is true indeed, and the other nice thing is that they can look nicer after post-processing. Many of my figures have rather plastic-like skin tones but you can make them look a good deal more lifelike with some creative processing.
Oh derp. Looks like I confused myself and melded 2 ideas into one, but you decoded what I meant to say xD. Heh, maybe I’m that guy who keeps giving figures the wrong scale ><.
Ah for me I've become so used to 16:9 that anything else takes a bit getting used to. Wide horizontal is good for games, in particular FPS, since you get a wider FoV. And yeah there's the whole 720p 1080p HD stuff for movies.
They are close enough XD I guess 3:2 would be 15:10. And I guess micro 4/3 users could use their pictures as wallpaper straight out of camera, if they weren’t using widescreen displays.
I like 16:10 as sort of a compromise, though I do remember that I really, really disliked the idea of going to a widescreen display from my old 20″ Dell 4:3 LCD. But now that I’ve used one for a while, I really like having the extra room on the sides. I think I like 16:10 better than 16:9 now but I’ve got the feeling that if I used the latter for a while, I’d get used to it very quickly.