Color profiles and monitor calibrations

MXM

I paid for this title
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To continue from the Lens Flair:

The only thing you need to do, to get a screen to display colours correctly, is to calibrate it. Even a screen worth thousands of dollars will need calibration, because colour rendering has a lot to do with the room you're in, what the ambient light intensity and colour is, etc. We're getting these on loan from the uni to fix up our screens at home: http://gretagmacbethstore.com/index.cfm/act/Catalog.cfm/catalogid/1861/Subcategory/i1%20Solutions/category/i1/browse/null/MenuGroup/__Menu%20USA%20New/desc/i1%20Display%202.htm

We'll also be calibrating our cameras and creating ICC profiles from them as well, because even those aren't set up correctly for every lighting set-up.

How exactly will that work though? As far as I know you need to re-calibrate your monitor at least every few weeks or so to get any benefit at all. If you calibrated it just the once surely that gives you a false sense of security :?. As for camera calibration the only thing I can think of the change that's extremely easy yet effective is the white balance but that is done on the fly depending on where you are at the time (obviously manufacturers can't predict specific lighting situations). If you are going into more depth than that I can't really see how much more beneficial it would be.

RAW removes any need for color profiles in camera ;)

But even once a year calibrated monitor will be much closer to never calibrated one, don't you think? I don't even really see why the calibration would become invalid in just few weeks. The only process which will affect it, that I can think of, is just plain aging.

If you're doing serious photo developping work, you need your camera ICC profiles for different light conditions and ALWAYS shoot in RAW (where white balance doesn't apply, really), they will work a lot better for preserving the right tonality as you change more than just temperature and tone (exposure, contrast, you name it) as each camera shoots in its own colour space (for example, the Nikon D2x shoots remarkably close to a full Adobe RGB (there is a bit of an overlap, but not much), this will make sure the camera captures what you see. Then you need to set your ambient light to 6500K and 60 lux, then you need to calibrate your screen (every few months, admitedly), you need to create an ICC profile for it, so the screen will display what the camera captured, no matter what colour space you shot the picture in. You also need to create an ICC profile of the printer you'll be printing on (this is usually done at the print shop continuously, as it depends on temperature, humidity, paper quality, ink quality, ink capacity and of course the printer itself. If the shop asks you to convert to CMYK for printing, just go elsewhere). Then, when exporting the image to a standard colour space (adobe RGB, sRGB, prophoto, etc...), you can be sure that the photo shop will convert the photo to CMYK using their printer's ICC profile so the printed image will be what you saw, what you captured and what you saw on your screen.

Now if any of those conditions is not set, the image won't turn out 100% and you don't really need a 650 euro screen, just a calibrated normal one. ;) At uni we have several "dark rooms" where we keep specific lighting conditions and also have use of some seriously bad ass hardware (just the screens alone are worth several grand each and the colour reproduction they have is staggering...), so all of this applies, but if you're just a hobby photographer and have no control of your lighting conditions, it's no use getting badass hardware as it's just as bad uncalibrated and if you have no control of the other aspects of photo development.
 
noob question, why does white balance not apply in RAWs?
 
What Ice is talking about here mostly applies to printing.

What about the Lens Flair? The issue with Alok's photos looking different for different people illustrates it the best (red vs. orange wheels). They looked orange in real life, so he adjusted them to look orange on his monitor, making it look red for many people (me included).

And how many people have any kind of calibration on their monitors? Just to set the WB correctly, at least, as this makes the largest visual difference I think. I don't, but I plan to. I have only tried to match my larger TN screen to a smaller PVA, and failed mostly so far :)
 
noob question, why does white balance not apply in RAWs?

Since your brain and eyes are automatically adjusted to different lighting conditions, you make WB corrections without noticing, so white looks white for you under the incandescent lighting as well as under the sun.

But you want white on every photo from different lighting conditions to look the same, as well as other colors, so you need to "mix" the values for the sensor in correct proportions and add a correct color mapping curve (gamma).

The RAW contains, as the name suggests, are raw values from the sensor, uncorrected and without color profile. You do it in the RAW conversion program instead (Adobe camera raw, Nikon capture, etc).

EDIT: But RAW also contains additional info, so when camera tries to automatically detect WB, it saves this information in RAW, so this setting is loaded by default in the conversion program. But you're free to adjust it to your liking if you think the camera's detection failed (happens often).
 
What Ice is talking about here mostly applies to printing.
Well, yeah, but as was seen in Alok's case, huge differences can occur even if there's no printing involved.
 
Since your brain and eyes are automatically adjusted to different lighting conditions, you make WB corrections without noticing, so white looks white for you under the incandescent lighting as well as under the sun.

So you mean trust the machine for white, instead of my eyes, which see white subjectively, depending on location?
 
I have to admit that I've never considered my images being off (tonality wise) when I've taken from from my camera and imported them into either LightRoom of PhotoShop (or any other software). Adobe have released profiles specifically for the D2x (and other Nikon models iirc) for different situations and I have used them occasionally but usually I just let ACR deal with them. If you were concerned about this wouldn't it be better just to use Capture NX to deal with your images? Obviously the camera manufacturers have spent a lot of money and hours developing these profiles and the software. It's quite possible that you could get things looking a bit better but in the 'real world' the only place you could probably notice the difference is on exceptionally good monitors with an extremely large colour gamut with perfect calibration and everything else.

Photographs are designed to be printed and I don't think there is even a pro-grade printer in existence that could convey the full colour gamut contained within a RAW file. So until printers have caught up I can't quite see the point in getting this kind of precision. I will say however that monitor a printer calibration is a must if you want any accuracy at all for your prints. I don't have this monitor calibrated and accept that if I printed any of my images they wouldn't turn out how I wanted them to. Going back to white balance briefly, I have found custom white balances extremely useful as you can usually get things looking completely right in camera. I always shoot RAW so I appreciated that I could do that easily in post processing but I have found this way saves a lot of time. I have also found that when I've accidentally left an old white balance on my camera I really like the way my photos come out. Without that 'mistake' it's unlikely that I would have gotten my images to look that way at all.

My mini conclusion: I have found that since I moved to digital I didn't need to have prints of my photographs done and because of that I have printed very few out. I think it's all too easy to view your work on a screen and appreciate it but photographs are supposed to be printed and not viewed on a screen! I also think that if you look too much into these small (arguably important) aspects of your photographs/photography you are somewhat missing the point. Getting all of your gear calibrated will make your photographs arguably more accurate however it will never make bad photographs good. Neither will it improve your photography in general. I just like to concentrate on what I have and do the best I can with it; it's satisfying.
 
So you mean trust the machine for white, instead of my eyes, which see white subjectively, depending on location?

I say exactly the opposite, with RAW you can adjust the white to look white, with automatic mode you trust the machine to know what looked like white to you.

Good method to avoid guesswork is to have a "calibrator" with you, aka a sheet of perfectly white paper :) Taking a picture of it, you get immediate reference point.

But the point still stands, without RAW you simply don't have the resolution to correct it afterward.
 
Alright, now i get it. :D
 
I also think that if you look too much into these small (arguably important) aspects of your photographs/photography you are somewhat missing the point. Getting all of your gear calibrated will make your photographs arguably more accurate however it will never make bad photographs good. Neither will it improve your photography in general. I just like to concentrate on what I have and do the best I can with it; it's satisfying.

This thread is not about making you a better photographer :p Which doesn't mean it should be ignored. You may not need to concern yourself with it, but it's certainly useful.
 
This is how it was explained to us at uni. You need to create an ICC profile for your camera, as each camera (even different year make of the same model) won't capture colours the same as you want them (ACR profiling here is useless, don't ask why, it just is). What you do is, you shoot a standard colour chart with your camera at default settings and this will tell the calibration software what colour space your camera is shooting in. When you import images from the camera to the computer, you need to tell your computer what colour space it was shot in, as it can't assume correctly, even through ACR. You also need a profile for your screen so it, interacting with the profile of the camera shows the correct green, the correct red and correct blue... Is this making any sense?
 
Yes, although I haven't heard of a tool that does this for you. All the examples I have seen have been people manually adjusting by using a colour chart at the start of each session then pulling the adjustments over to all of the images taken at that time.
 
Heh, yeah my uni uses Gretag Macbeth Eye-One but to be honest I wasn't too hot on spending ?800 for the lowest model. I will be getting a Pantone Huey Pro pretty soon which should be cool :).
 
Got loads of Gretag Macbeth stuff in work. Good kit. Even have a copy of profile maker worth ?2k+!
 
One of the problems I have with calibration is that, while I'm calibrated for printing (I can pretty much get on paper what I see on my monitor) I'm not really well set-up for JPEGs. With my workflow, I don't shoot in JPEG and I create the JPEG after I've done things necessary to get a good print (I'm a fine art photographer, I don't shoot a lot of cars, FWIW, but I do a lot of color work.) When I export my files to JPEG they seem to drop some colors. It's not a major disappointment but I do notice a difference in quality between the JPEGs output for the web and the prints (not so much with the on-screen PSD versions, but more when viewing the JPEGs themselves.) Especially my night work. I had done some architectural night work for exhibition last year and it was quite "glowing" on paper, but the JPEGs don't have the same quality.

If you are doing a lot of printing though, a reasonably good calibration is a must. I can't speak for everybody here but I know I'd go mad without some degree of calibration. The monitor just looks too bright and the paper too dark without it. You'd go through thousands of dollars of ink (not to mention sanity!) without matching up the two. Throw in the various paper types and I'd be absolutely bonkers (well, maybe I am anyway, but the lack of monitor calibration would not help things here.)
 
If you export the jpeg to a standard colourspace (for web it HAS to be sRGB), it should look the same.
 
If you export the jpeg to a standard colourspace (for web it HAS to be sRGB), it should look the same.

Really? I thought that most monitors could display more that sRGB - using sRGB is a safeguard to make sure everybody sees something similar as it is the lowest common denominator of sorts. Some people will see a difference on screen between Adobe RGB and sRGB. If you convert to sRGB you should see minimal difference.
 
Yes, most monitors can actually display more than AdobeRGB, but web browsers will assume sRGB and images will be sucky.
 
I don't see why anyone would need AdobeRGB for the web, and if he doesn't do printing. It's not "better" than any other color space, it has same amount of bits to describe the color. It just chooses to spend those bits to get a wider gamut, while sRGB gets a higher color "resolution" because it has smaller range to cover.

And actually most cheaper LCD screen have a gamut VERY close to sRGB, you need an expensive MVA/PVA or IPS to get a larger cover than even AdobeRGB has to offer. If you do your processing in an 8bit AdobeRGB and convert it to sRGB at the end - you've lost data. It's better to do all photoshopping in sRGB if you don't print. Or in 16bits.
 
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