The Manic Mechanic

Actually, if you have a good service bureau, they'll do a better job of the colour conversion than you can at home, as they have the profiles for their equipment, rather than the generic profile for that type of equipment.

From:

mikiedoggie.livejournal.com

I agree with that. When I've made prints, I just e-mail them to Adorama and let them know what color profile I've used. They usually do a fine job of making my prints come out the way I envisioned them.

From:

No, your post is quite helpful, thanks.

I have heard of the CMYK color space trick prior to printing does at least give one a better feel for consistency. Flickr does tend to make use of color space info and changes the look of photos posted there (not necessarily in a bad way, but enough to be confusing for me). I guess I am centered so much on consistency and repeatability, I want to control the process enough as to not get frustrated with it as I go along.

From:

I work in Adobe or PhotoPro, but always always always convert to sRGB before uploading images.

Your file in almost all cases will be shown using the sRGB color table, and uploading an image that uses any other color space is just going to disappoint everyone.

From:

Converting to CMYK won't do anything for you but add another conversion to your workflow.

From:

Get a Colorvision Spyder. They're inexpensive (maybe $70), and do the job.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/colorvisionspyder.htm

You'll also want to make sure you setup Photoshop correctly.

Funny, I just had a huge private post on this last night... most of my Flickr pictures have a distinct magenta/yellow cast to them. Flickr does do some color correction when it processes your pictures, but I think the problem was with with a corrupt monitor calibration on my end.

It's the difference between this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danlmarmot/2505104414/

and this one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danlmarmot/2506718361/

That first picture was done with the corrupt calibration (as were all the ones in that set). The second picture was done after I recalibrated the monitor... a clear difference.

Edited Date: 2008-05-20 05:22 pm (UTC)

From:

I discovered Flickr's hidden tweakery a while ago in this post, which made subtle differences in the exact same file posted there versus simply hosting the file somewhere. I know it's impossible to make my images look consistent across everyone else's displays, I want to maintain consistency on my own gear.

I also calibrate every imaginable type of electronic test equipment for a living, and it's a habit that is hard to break. lol

I see the diff plainly between each of your photos, and to that end, I want to be able to control such aspects here. To prevent weird color happenstances with my pictures, I've refrained from doing any color manipulation to pictures if I can help it, and at most doing brightness, contrast and gamma levels. A while ago I had some pictures of myself that I had redone since the photos they came from were faded. What looked okay on my display gave me the skin tone of raw Jimmy Dean pork sausage on other displays. Yikes!

From:

budmassey.livejournal.com

The second picture is vastly superior. Are you using the correct white balance?

From:

On the camera? No, I'm not using any white balance on the camera as these are raw images.

The big difference is that the good one was processed with Nikon's Capture NX software, and the bad one was processed in Adobe Lightroom. Both iwere color corrected and look the same... but Capture exports a pretty JPEG (against a sRGB color space), while Lightroom exports that pinkish sRGB JPEG.

Something odd is going on.

From:

budmassey.livejournal.com

You know, I would have guessed the second picture was a Nikon balance. Nikon always shifts slightly blue. They have a set of filters you can install on Photoshop that really work beautifully, but the color balance was always on the cool side. I don't have the filters installed anymore, but I do like the way they work.

From:

bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com

I just give up on calibration systems ... print jobs I specify Pantone colours so that's OK, but the so called "universal" calibration systems are not absolutely not universal no matter what anyone tells you. The best you can do is to calibrate using a particular monitor and a particular platform, knowing the monitor and platform (or output device) that will be using the file, but it's absolutely guaranteed that no matter what you do someone is going to sanctimoniously bitch at you about what a terrible job you do with the colour and brightness etc etc etc. The worst is the difference between Win and Mac machines, there is just nothing you can do about it.

From:

I am mainly looking for consistency on my end and on the PCs I use. Any printing I do is casual, but I'd like to get into that aspect of it some more on just a (more serious) hobby level. I'd like to tame some of the frustrations I feel from bitchy hardware or fussy tweaking.

From:

bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com

I print at a service bureau and I always take the files there and colour correct them on their monitors, even though we are running exactly the same software and supposedly have the same calibration. It is that specific. As for trying to make Win and Mac machines work alike, good luck.

From:

Nope, not going to try to make the two platforms look alike, I want to gain a bit more understanding why they are so different.

Since I have no Macs, I am trying to level these differences in my own gear more than anything else.

From:

bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com

Ah gotcha, then I think

theoctothorpe's advice covers it.

From:

here's the real deal:

Are you going for print?

No: Don't bother calibrating, as everyone's monitor is different. This is nothing you can control.

Yes: Calibrate to the specific profile of the substrate you'll be printing onto with the specific printer you will be using to print. You will need to calibrate all the devices in the chain (scanner, monitor, printer). This is a giant pain in the arse, and often not really worth doing for short-run prints, as you have to do this every month or so to account for drift. Do you wish to continue?

Continue: Get yourself a spider (an optical calibration device), and follow the steps. Always use that profile.

End: Relax and learn to love the bomb.

Edited Date: 2008-05-20 06:20 pm (UTC)

From:

I am trying to get consistency among my monitors more than anything else. I figured a spider or a huey would at least make things a bit easier to do this. I know I wont be able to prevent the Mac folks from saying my gamma sucks. My eyes are not what they used to be, and I think I could make use of a mechanical reference. As for printing, it's all casual here at home. I would like to get a decent larger-format printer for the hobby aspects of it, and there is no reason why I cant make things look decent. I am a n00b in many ways, and always like getting suggestions from pros and others as well as experienting on my own.

You da bomb. ;)

From:

I think the calibration device will give you what you need.

From:

Also note that while MacOS has a system-wide understanding of colour profiles, not all apps actually use the OS hooks, so they don't read the profile at all. Windows (up to at least XP... donnow, about Vista) doesn't have a system-wide colour profile synching mechanism, so expect the images to look odd on a per-application basis.

From:

I have (thankfully) only one Vista PC, it's the laptop. Now, I dont know if the display in the thing just plain sucks, or there is something out of kilter with it, but while a desktop or graphic elements look decent on it, photos looks like arse. Since it's my only portable for the foreseeable future, I'd like to make the best of it.

(deleted comment)

From:

I am a n00b as well, and this is something I've been trying to sort out on my own for a while for similar reasons to yours. Some applications like PS use ~~color~~colour profiles to not only maintain similar levels among applications and hardware, but to give an accurate screen representation as well (this is where the calibration comes in). This awareness does not always span different applications, this is why your application shows changes in levels. I am not familiar with Graphic Converter, so I am useless for specific help. I used to be in a similar position, as I would use an old program called LView Pro for quick-and-dirty graphic editing mostly for web use. It saved compact files, and the program was a cinch to use for typical simple editing. Thing is, later on, I found out that LView fundamentally changed the levels of resulting files when opened up in Photoshop or other graphics programs at the time. In shrinking the files, LView would strip embedded info that various programs used to keep levels consistent, and printing some of the resulting files often made for dark, flat prints. This was a good 8 years ago. Things are much more interoperable, but once you look beyond the simple photo editing for casual consumer use, it gets very complicated. I want to move a bit beyond what I am doing now, and I'm finding out it's a jungle out there.

Not sure what you can do to correct the issues you are having with your files, I would experiment using different color space settings to see which one maintains the best levels between apps.

From:

Back in the day I used to test this stuff... for Mac Internet Explorer, which was the first browser to correctly display images with embedded profiles (you'll need to go looking for Mac IE 4.5). That was in 1998, believe it or not.

Windows XP does have a system-wide color profile synching mechanism. (it's under Display Properties - Settings - Color Management). It's just that not many applications use it, including the built in Picture Viewer. Vista is more aware, and uses color profiles (including embedded ones) to display images.

And I respectfully disagree with Christopher--color managing your monitor is an absolute necessity.

For printing at Costco, this guy has good advice: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2008/05/great-prints-from-labs.html. His other posts on color profiles are really worth reading too (http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/search/label/color%20profile).

From:

Ayup... Mac IE used ColorSync.

The problem though, is that not every screen will be calibrated, so if you're not printing, you simply can't guarantee the image will look the same for everyone who views it. For web designers, this usually meant *throwing out* any embedded profile information, so you'd get uniform colours (because the same image would look different when it had a profile, for obvious reasons, also, HTML hex values didn't pay attention to the profile).

Also, if you're not printing, what are you calibrating *for*? You have to have a target.

Of course, I've actually routed around the problem. I shoot and print entirely in black and white =) Mmmm K7 system!

From:

:-) there is always that solution.

I just export to sRGB, and embed that profile. Kinda least common denominator, but it works.

From:

I am calibrating for the other people who calibrate :)

From:

sfmini.livejournal.com

Ya, know, I live half a mile from Haight Ashbury, I could get you some LSD and then you could see pretty colors without the benefit of a monitor. That might not be the solution you were looking for, but then I'm not a graphics professional or photographer

From: