Monitor Calibration

[Godfrey]

Maybe they can make the computer control the monitor! That's a good idea!

Why didn't they come up with that earlier? I have had a computer and a monitor for more than twenty years, but I have never heard of this problem before. Yes, from time to time a monitor died. Or is it that computers are now more refined so that these problems became evident?

Erik.

Display calibration and profiling have been a part of the computer workflow since I was doing image processing at JPL/NASA in the early 1980s, which is where I learned a lot of the basics required. It was a lot harder to achieve then than it is now, and changed much much much more frequently with all that ancient hardware and phosphor-tube display technology. Never mind the awful digital printing technology that took until the middle '00s to finally get a handle on.. 😀

That said, if you only ever use one computer and one printing setup to work on, display your images on, and print your images from, you can do completely without calibration and display profiling ... as long as you figure out how to achieve good results, you're good. BUT that's not so good a solution for the modern age where you want to be able to send images around to a billion viewers to view on a billion and a half different displays, wanting the results to look pretty similar on all of them. 😱

G

 

[x-ray]

Erik go back and read my post 23.

 

[GMOG]

Maybe they can make the computer control the monitor!

This is essentially what the modern calibration tools do, but the process cannot be fully automatic because using the sensor interferes with our use of the monitor. Fully automatic processes like we see in cars are possible because the working sensors do not interfere with our use of the car.

 

[Erik van Straten]

Erik go back and read my post 23.

I did but why this is NOW an issue? Twenty years ago there were also computers and monitors. Many people will feel besotted. Yes, professional computer people knew this, but the majority of the users did not.

Godfreys explication is very clear and tells a lot. Thank you very much, sir!

Erik.

 

[x-ray]

I did but why is this NOW an issue? Twenty years ago there were also computers and monitors. Many people will feel besotted.

It has ALWAYS been a problem. You just didn’t know about it.

You don’t need to know the why, just accept this is the way the world is and buy a calibrator and calibrate your monitor or simply forget it and keep doing things the wrong way. Your choice.

You’re taking this in circles and it’s not necessary. Most of us don’t know the “why” for much of life but we accept it and move on. You know you need to calibrate your monitor and if you read previous posts carefully you’ll understand why. Electronics aren’t 100% stable throughout their life. Temperature, age and deterioration affect all electronic systems as well as different standards for different applications. (Read above posts)

This is starting to take on the feeling of a conversation with my son when he was 3 years old, “Why daddy? Why daddy?”. Not that you’re 3 years old, don’t misunderstand me, but just accept what needs to be done and calibrate your monitor or just move on. Simple, yes? Many things in life remain a mystery but we accept them and live inside the boundaries. 👍

 

[Erik van Straten]

It has ALWAYS been a problem. You just didn’t know about it.

You don’t need to know the why, just accept this is the way the world is and buy a calibrator and calibrate your monitor or simply forget it and keep doing things the wrong way. Your choice.

You’re taking this in circles and it’s not necessary. Most of us don’t know the “why” for much of life but we accept it and move on. You know you need to calibrate your monitor and if you read previous posts carefully you’ll understand why. Electronics aren’t 100% stable throughout their life. Temperature, age and deterioration affect all electronic systems as well as different standards for different applications. (Read above posts)

This is starting to take on the feeling of a conversation with my son when he was 3 years old, “Why daddy? Why daddy?”. Not that you’re 3 years old, don’t misunderstand me, but just accept what needs to be done and calibrate your monitor or just move on. Simple, yes? Many things in life remain a mystery but we accept them and live inside the boundaries. 👍

Thank you very much, sir!

Erik.

 

[ItsNottheFstop]

Disclosure: I calibrate.
And, I know that this is a tangent (and a stretch at that), but this reminds me of a statement that Winogrand made - something to the effect that anybody who uses an "open" printing style will be able to print from his negatives and achieve an effective (in the sense that it would follow G.W.'s intent) print. Yes, monochrome. Yes, many of us work in colour. But before I went over to the digital darkside, I shot colour on pretty much nothing but Kodachrome. You really wondered sometimes how things were going to come back from the lab.

What we have now with (relatively) inexpensive printers and excellent monitors is a level of control that would have made Pete Turner drool. A calibrated monitor and a pro-level printer say, an Epson 3880 or 7890 for instance, will give you far greater control than any lab relationship did with film. There were, and I presume are, still artisans in the chemical world who can soup your colour neg/reversal stock but I'll leave them to the medium and large format brethern.

Paradoxically, this enables, if one wants, a far simpler workflow. After a few hundred frames and as many prints withing the closed system of your own "lab" you will have a really accurate idea of how the gamut will translate from camera to monitor to printer/combination.

 

[PRJ]

Think of every device as a language unto itself. The profiles/calibration are the translators. If you didn't have the translators then every device would speak a language but they wouldn't understand the other. That is as simple as it can be explained.

 

[Erik van Straten]

Think of every device as a language unto itself. The profiles/calibration are the translators. If you didn't have the translators then every device would speak a language but they wouldn't understand the other. That is as simple as it can be explained.

Yes, that sounds reasonable, but why was this until now no problem? It sounds like the creator of Coca-Cola is saying that the whole world has been waiting for the invention of Coca-Cola for centuries.

 

[Freakscene]

Yes, that sounds reasonable, but why was this until now no problem? It sounds like the creator of Coca-Cola is saying that the whole world has been waiting for the invention of Coca-Cola for centuries.

This was a problem since the beginning. It is not new. If it is a new problem for you, it means for a while you were lucky before inevitability caught you.

Marty

 

[Erik van Straten]

This was a problem since the beginning. It is not new. If it is a new problem for you, it means for a while you were lucky before inevitability caught you.

Marty

No, the phenomenon is not new, if you come into a museum and you see a famous painting, you are also shocked because the colors do not match those of the reproductions of that painting that are in books or on calendars. However, I wonder if this device is capable of making all monitors emit completely equal colors. I highly doubt that.

Erik.

 

[Freakscene]

No, the phenomenon is not new, if you come into a museum and you see a famous painting, you are also shocked because the colors do not match those of the reproductions of that painting that are in books or on calendars. However, I wonder if this device is capable of making all monitors emit completely equal colors. I highly doubt that.

Erik.

Colour reproduction on paper is a completely different problem from digital calibration. A book is at least 3 generations away from the original and the reproduction medium is completely different from the original. In digital calibration, the basic source for the image, the file, is the same across devices.

If the colours are in gamut, and the luminance is controlled, those factors will look the same. There are other variables, of course, but your colours and contrast should match.

Marty

 

[Erik van Straten]

Thank you, Marty, I will think it over. I've been looking for someone to help me to install the "color checker", but that is rather difficult. Help with digital problems is in Amsterdam plenty available, but the people have never heard of a "color checker". However, the shop where I bought it had quite a lot of them in stock.

Erik.

 

[Godfrey]

Thank you, Marty, I will think it over. I've been looking for someone to help me to install the "color checker", but that is rather difficult. Help with digital problems is in Amsterdam plenty available, but the people have never heard of a "color checker". However, the shop where I bought it had quite a lot of them in stock.

I don't understand what the installation issue is.

The "color checker" (or colorimeter device, or Xrite Display Pro, or whichever one you want to use) is just a device that comes with an application that drives it and does the calibration and profiling. You install the software (typically includes a Windows install .exe or Mac Installer document to do that automagically). Then, when you want to run a calibration and profile, you plug in the device, run the app, and it tells you exactly what to do at every step in the process. If you want to do as I have, you customize the settings to suit your specific needs/desires.

Once you're done, it will have installed the appropriate profile into your computer's OS and selected it .. You disconnect the device and put it away, maybe put a note on your calendar to do the calibration and profile again three to six months later.

When you've gotten to that point, your computer system and display are configured for editing. At this point, how you use the system and whatever applications you use for rendering your photographs is specific to exactly what applications you use and what you are doing. The basics, however, are that you do your editing work and then, when it's time to output the image for posting to the web, you tell the app to embed the sRGB profile into the JPEG you want to post. If you are going to print the image, in whatever printing system you use, you tell the print driver (with the app you print from) what printer and paper you are printing to so as to get the highest fidelity match to what you see on screen in the editing process. If you send your photos out to be printed, you talk with the print service and ask them if they want a specific printing profile to be embedded into the print files, and do that with your rendering app when you prepare the print file outputs.

This work has been a part of image rendering and management for decades. The reason the question came up is simply that someone on this forum, the "original poster", asked how to do it because they wanted to use their laptop with color management and weren't sure how to accomplish that.

The classic text that articulated this system first was written by the late Bruce Fraser, et al, and is named "Real World Color Management"; the date of the 2nd Edition volume on my shelf is (c)2005; I believe the first edition was (c) 1998 or something like that. Bruce was brilliant at explaining this stuff, but sadly passed away when young about 2003.

G

 

[Erik van Straten]

I don't understand what the installation issue is.

The "color checker" (or colorimeter device, or Xrite Display Pro, or whichever one you want to use) is just a device that comes with an application that drives it and does the calibration and profiling. You install the software (typically includes a Windows install .exe or Mac Installer document to do that automagically). Then, when you want to run a calibration and profile, you plug in the device, run the app, and it tells you exactly what to do at every step in the process. If you want to do as I have, you customize the settings to suit your specific needs/desires.

Once you're done, it will have installed the appropriate profile into your computer's OS and selected it .. You disconnect the device and put it away, maybe put a note on your calendar to do the calibration and profile again three to six months later.

When you've gotten to that point, your computer system and display are configured for editing. At this point, how you use the system and whatever applications you use for rendering your photographs is specific to exactly what applications you use and what you are doing. The basics, however, are that you do your editing work and then, when it's time to output the image for posting to the web, you tell the app to embed the sRGB profile into the JPEG you want to post. If you are going to print the image, in whatever printing system you use, you tell the print driver (with the app you print from) what printer and paper you are printing to so as to get the highest fidelity match to what you see on screen in the editing process. If you send your photos out to be printed, you talk with the print service and ask them if they want a specific printing profile to be embedded into the print files, and do that with your rendering app when you prepare the print file outputs.

This work has been a part of image rendering and management for decades. The reason the question came up is simply that someone on this forum, the "original poster", asked how to do it because they wanted to use their laptop with color management and weren't sure how to accomplish that.

The classic text that articulated this system first was written by the late Bruce Fraser, et al, and is named "Real World Color Management"; the date of the 2nd Edition volume on my shelf is (c)2005; I believe the first edition was (c) 1998 or something like that. Bruce was brilliant at explaining this stuff, but sadly passed away when young about 2003.

G

Many thanks for this wonderful exposée, but, my dear Godfrey, I don't want to print the image at all, I just want to see it and put it on Flickr. After all, I already have the prints! The only images I want to put on the internet are gelatin silver prints and I have already made them myself, without a printer or a computer. They are black and white prints, so I have no color problems. What should I do with a color checker? I have one, but I think I'll sell it.

Again, thanks a lot for this great explanation, I'm sure many members will be very happy with it. I'm very happy with it too, because I know now that I don't need a color checker.

Erik.

 

[ptpdprinter]

Many thanks for this wonderful exposée, but, my dear Godfrey, I don't want to print the image at all, I just want to see it and put it on Flickr. After all, I already have prints, because the only images I want to put on the internet are gelatin silver prints and I have already made them myself. They are black and white, so I have no color problems. What should I do with a color checker? I have one, but I think I'll sell it.

Consider that the color checker has a row of boxes at the bottom ranging from white to black. Also consider that when calibrating a monitor for color, it will eliminate tinges of color in the greys.

Certainly, if you are convinced you don't need to calibrate your monitor, don't calibrate your monitor.

 

[Erik van Straten]

Ptpdprinter, it is totally unclear to me how the colorchecker works because there are no instructions in the box. How can I see what it does if I can't use it?

Erik.

 

[ptpdprinter]

Ptpdprinter, it is totally unclear to me how the colorchecker works because there are no instructions in the box. How can I see what it does if I can't use it?

Erik.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a photographer in your area who would be willing to come over to your house and calibrate your monitor, maybe for a small fee. You might want to check with your local camera club. That way you wouldn't have to buy anything and learn how to use it.

I did the same with my television a while back. I didn't want to buy the equipment and learn how to use it, I got a guy to come over, and he calibrated my TV in about an hour. It made a substantial improvement. There is no shame in asking others to help.

 

[x-ray]

I’m starting to be a little suspicious of our friend. Could he be messing with us? I’ve taught a lot of folks photography both young and quite old and I’ve never encountered anyone quite like this.

I’ve given up. Like I mentioned earlier it’s like talking to my son when he was 3 years old. You just go in circles.

Just a thought.

 

[x-ray]

There’s a positive side to these threads that go in circles, it provides a great deal of really good information for anyone interested in the topic.