Jerome,
I understand what you mean. Sometimes you have to adhere your color grading to within the parameters of how the image was shot. I’m just using the screen on my MSI Dominator Pro 72GTS calibrated with an earlier model of the SpiderX
https://spyderx.datacolor.com/
SInce this is just a hobby for me( I’m a Civilian Military Contractor who also buys and sell land for a living) I haven’t upgraded to what I really want to use which is the Dell up3221q
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1613843-REG/dell_up3221q_32_ultra_hd_sharp_4k.html/?msclkid=f4894639d64111e875ef27334e9b6ca5
My thing with the image above was that I thought the way you graded it made her look unimportant. I wanted to bring out her eyes to make the image more about the female talent, which I believe is your girlfriend, and less about the technical aspect of the image.
I know that we all have to adhere to certain technical guidelines, like not clipping highlights or crushing shadows, keeping colors from going Out- Of - Gamut, properly exposing skintones for different ethnicities…etc. But within those technical specs, there’s a lot of room for creative ways to better tell the story of the images that we are seeing.
To me a great image is an image that tells me a story, that makes me think in a way that I never thought before, that makes me better understand the person/ person’s behind the look and feel of the image better. Sometimes a strictly technically perfect image to me is boring and uninteresting.
In my teenage and early twenties, I use to paint and take alot of photos. I never painted or took a photo of sometime unless it spoke something specific to me or made me feel a certain way. After I graduated from College however, I discontinued during both. About ten years after not painting or shooting any stills I got into video editing and color correcting. I found that I could do more with images digitally than with anything I tried before. Most of my painting were of really dark subject matter, and living in a rather conservative community, that didn’t go over too well.
Here is a sample of the type of painting I use to do. I starting grading a image someone uploaded on Reduser, and well it went off the rails from there.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?166564-Some-MONSTRO-mixed-lowlight-impressions/page13
When I grade images, I make it more about what I believe the image is about and how I can best tell that story than technical perfection while also adhering within technical guidelines.