monitor calibration

[otc]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

Having said that, is a CRT better than a cheapo $200 lcd from the point of view of a color representation?

It depends, I am a big user of slickdeals and my last monitor was a dell with a lot of coupon stacking. It has great color (they use other peoples panels, this model had 2 suppliers but I got one from the good one) and was about $200. A monitor that retails at $200 new might not be so great but...they have been improving a lot lately--just make sure it isnt a 6-bit

Originally Posted by matadorpoeta

i went to the lab today and they basically told me that i should just calibrate my monitor, and that the icc profiles are only for their highest end printer. i can download the profile from their website. for other prints, like proof prints for fuji fronteir and for making books, there is no profile. they said just to calibrate my monitor and be sure to work in rgb instead of cmyk. make sense?

Lies. They are probably expecting documents to come in encoded for sRGB (like point and shoot digitals take) and have the print software calibrated against that. There is ALWAYS a way to make a real profile and if you know what machines they have, there is probably one online. Otherwise you can make your own with a calibration tool and a test print. That being said, they may be preprocessing all files from srgb so giving them a different profile would mess things up. Some shops might like Adobe RGB but it is risky

 

[username79]

I just bought a Dell 3007wfp-hc, $805

, from Dell Outlet using their 15% off coupon that expires tomorrow.

Just bought this,

http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-mc-s3pro.php

As I heard it was a necessity.

 

[username79]

Originally Posted by matadorpoeta

thanks for this. i'm using an old emac right now which has a built-in crt monitor, and i used the apple calibration wizard but now everything looks orange. i was advised to use a white point of d65 and that standard gamma is 2.2, as opposed to the 1.8 which is apple's standard. i'll see what my lab says tomorrow.
What is your paypal address? Maybe people here will send you some donations so you can kick that ************* to the curb.

 

[A Y]

Originally Posted by matadorpoeta

i have to ask, how does the calibration tool work on a t.v.? does it tell you how to adjust the t.v. yourself or does it somehow control the t.v. settings on its own?

The calibration software I use (Calman) has you enter the range of your controls, and then measures, and suggests a change which you manually make. Repeat, and hopefully the results converge. There are some TVs that can be controlled through a serial port, and in those cases, the software does it all.

However, you also need a TV with access to the primary and hopefullly secondary color adjustments. Many TVs have something like this accessible only from a service menu.

i went to the lab today and they basically told me that i should just calibrate my monitor, and that the icc profiles are only for their highest end printer. i can download the profile from their website. for other prints, like proof prints for fuji fronteir and for making books, there is no profile. they said just to calibrate my monitor and be sure to work in rgb instead of cmyk. make sense?

Run away! They don't sound like they know what they're doing at all. Besides the ignorance of ICC, they also say lots of other scary things like working in RGB.

--Andre

 

[matadorpoeta]

Originally Posted by otc

Lies. They are probably expecting documents to come in encoded for sRGB (like point and shoot digitals take) and have the print software calibrated against that. There is ALWAYS a way to make a real profile and if you know what machines they have, there is probably one online. Otherwise you can make your own with a calibration tool and a test print. That being said, they may be preprocessing all files from srgb so giving them a different profile would mess things up. Some shops might like Adobe RGB but it is risky

Originally Posted by Andre Yew

The calibration software I use (Calman) has you enter the range of your controls, and then measures, and suggests a change which you manually make. Repeat, and hopefully the results converge. There are some TVs that can be controlled through a serial port, and in those cases, the software does it all.

However, you also need a TV with access to the primary and hopefullly secondary color adjustments. Many TVs have something like this accessible only from a service menu.



Run away! They don't sound like they know what they're doing at all. Besides the ignorance of ICC, they also say lots of other scary things like working in RGB.

--Andre

i use a pro lab in hollywood, which i understand to be one of the top pro labs in the country. what i think is confusing is that there are monitor profiles, and then there are printer profiles (i think). basically they are telling me that i need to calibrate my monitor and that will create a custom monitor profile in my computer.

the printer profiles are something they apply in the lab when they make my prints, and they have nothing to do with how the image looks on my monitor. for example, the printer profiles you can download from their website are to be applied as the LAST step before saving the file on your computer(after you've already done the image correction), and this is only done for direct-to-print, where you upload the file and it goes directly to the printer without any intervention on their part. if i were to walk in there with image files on a disk and say, "here, print this for me." they would apply the printer profile.

so it doesn't seem to me like their printer profile is something i need to have in my computer, "turned on", while i'm editing images. make sense?

 

[A Y]

Originally Posted by matadorpoeta

so it doesn't seem to me like their printer profile is something i need to have in my computer, "turned on", while i'm editing images. make sense?

Yes, but you need to color-correct your images for their printing process, and that's what the printer profile is used for. Most labs won't apply that profile for you, but perhaps you have one that does. The best thing to do is to run a test image through their printer and see how it turns out.

--Andre

 

[Brian SD]

Matador, basically it works like this:

Printed image <--- [photo's profile] --- On-screen photo <--- [monitor's profile] --- Your eyes

Hardware wise (your monitor/video card) needs to be displaying the most correct colors. This is why you calibrate it with an Eye One or similar calibrator. This way you're keeping up with a standard between all computers, and what one computer says is, say, ultramarine blue, another computer says is also ultramarine blue (but much, much more precise than that generalized color), and most importantly, YOU see it as ultramarine blue.

Software wise: The next thing you'd want to do is edit your picture in the best color profile for the situation. When doing photos, I always use ProPhoto RGB - it was recommended to me by my photography teacher as having the widest and best color gamut. When you have everything exactly how you think it should look, you can save your file and get ready to print. The thing here is that before you send your files to your printer, you need to change the color profile of your photo into the color profile that your printer uses.

If your printer says that they don't use ICC profiles for their printers, they're hacks. As recommended, find out what that specific printer is and download the profile online. Then, you bring the profile into PS, and convert your photo into that profile (a CYMK profile, more colors if the printer is nicer, my printer at home is CMYKRGB + glossy black). Photoshop will do just fine converting the color profile, the key is that you don't want the printer to convert it for you - that's where you lose color consistency.

Anyway, once you've converted to the printer's profile, now you know exactly what the print will look like - your monitor is calibrated so your eyes are seeing the right colors, and your software is photo is calibrated so that the printer uses the colors you see on screen.

Seems like a ridiculous process, but when you've done it a couple times and set things up it becomes quick and easy - plus, Photoshop has batch processing to help you do all your photos at once.

Hopes this helps...

 

[otc]

Originally Posted by Brian SD

now you know exactly what the print will look like

If you have a calibrated monitor, this should be true. If the lab is telling you that you do not need a printer profile and the print does not look exactly like your monitor (except better since it is higher resolution) then the lab is wrong and you need a profile.

I can however see a situation where not needing a profile would make sense. If you were going to start a high end top-quality service print shop it might make sense to:
*print a daily/weekly (whatever makes sense) test print with color boxes
*use a calibration tool to generate a profile exatly for that day's ink and paper stock
*apply that profile to all customers' images being printed that day.

I think it makes sense that the only reason you should ever have to even *think* about printer profiles is if you are doing the printing yourself.

 

[matadorpoeta]

i finally got around to buying a calibration device (x-rite eye-one display lt) and am having trouble with it. it seems to work fine except that the profile it creates gives an orange/pinkish glow to my monitor.

what i suspect is going on, is that during the process there is a step i am skipping because i do not know how to adjust my monitor's rgb levels manually. (using an emac).

i know i can do this if i go into the calibration wizard, but i can't run that and the calibration program at the same time. does anyone know how to do this?

thanks.