(no subject)

[greatbear]

I have a question, directed at those on my list who are graphics professionals or photographers. Do you use a monitor color calibrator, or adjust by eye? If you use a calibrator, what kind do you use? While on my last trip, I had my laptop with me. When I offloaded my pictures to it, I thought I had ruined a large number of them playing with exposure settings. When I got home to my desktop system things looked much better. I still have yet to tweak this new display I got the other day, but it looks good on the old profile.

I am looking for something to help give consistency to the various systems and displays I use. I am also wondering how to best match the screen colors with my printed output. So, I figure I'd turn this into a 'Dear Lazywebs' post and see what you folks have for suggestions. You can even tell me to pound sand if you want.

TIA!

Comments

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

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.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

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.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

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 colorcolour 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.

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

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).

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

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!

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

:-) there is always that solution.

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

[mondragon.livejournal.com]

I am calibrating for the other people who calibrate :)