How to calibrate a printer and monitor if neither are very good

Question

If I have a mediocre monitor, and a reasonable but not fantastic printer, what are my options for getting a good photo print?

Printer ink is not cheap, and I usually do not have the patience or resources to print out several attempts with various adjustments to brightness, contrast etc. I find it particularly difficult to get the settings to a good enough compromise between seeing the detail in dark parts of the printed image versus blowing out the highlights.

Asked by Joel in Gö

Answer

Probably not the answer you want, but if you have a bad monitor, and a bad printer, you're probably going to get bad prints.

A color calibration system (hardware) would help, but that's an investment of money and if you aren't willing to do that for your monitor/printer I'm guessing you aren't willing to spend the money on a calibrator.

If you don't make a lot of prints, the best option might be to use a third-party printer... drugstore, online, etc. Good printers will allow you to download the printer profile for their equipment, and you can use that profile in your photo editor (Photoshop, etc) so that what you see matches what gets printed.

Answered by ahockley

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Why do my sRGB exports from Lightroom look different from RAW files shown in the program even though my monitor can only show sRGB?

Question

I have read tons of docs about color management over the Web, but there is something I can't understand.

I have a screen that can only render the RGB color space.

It is very well calibrated using a LaCie Blue Eye Pro.

I use Lightroom to see an image, shot as RAW with a Canon camera, in "Adobe RGB" color space (even if that does not mean anything in this case).

When I open the image into Lighroom, and export it as JPG in the RGB color space, the image seen into Lightroom is not rendered the same as the one exported.

The thing that I don't understand is that, whatever the color space my original image can be, whatever the screen is calibrated or not, whatever software I use to see the image, if my screen cannot render more than the RGB color space, I guess that the image displayed into Lightroom and the one exported in the RGB color space should be rendered the same way on the screen.

What's wrong ?

Asked by Oliver

Answer

Color management is an annoyance that I've recently been learning about; it is not completely accurate to say that just because your monitor can only display sRGB that it's meaningless for your photos to be edited in the AdobeRGB or ProPhotoRGB space. What is actually happening is that Lightroom is translating colors from ProPhotoRGB into the sRGB space that your monitor can display. It does a bunch of fancy math (I think maybe some matrix algebra? I'm not positive, though, maybe somebody can correct me) to perform this translation -- thus, what you see in Lightroom is not your image as it appears in ProPhotoRGB or in sRGB, you are seeing an interpretation of ProPhotoRGB space in sRGB that tries to be as faithful as possible to what the image would look like on a device capable of displaying ProPhotoRGB.

When you export your photos from LR, you have the option of choosing what color space you want to use for the exported photo (you can choose sRGB, AdobeRGB, and ProPhotoRGB, among others). When LR does this, it first converts the photo into the chosen color space, and embeds information into the JPEG file describing the color space (these things are called ICC profiles). Now, when you open the JPEG in some other program, if that program is able to understand the embedded color space information, it can perform the same math that LR does to convert the file into your monitor's color space, and it should appear the same (or at least similar to) LR. If the program you open it in can interpret this embedded color space information, we say that it's a color-managed application.

The problem is that a lot of applications are not color-managed. Windows Photo Viewer may or may not be (I've read competing statements, but in any case it doesn't seem to work as well as LR); Firefox only supports old versions of ICC profiles, Safari and IE are, and Chrome is not. So if you open up your image in one of those applications that doesn't support color profiles, or doesn't support them well, your image is going to look bad because the proper color translation isn't being performed.

There's a really nice three-part series on color management here. You can also check out whether the device you're displaying supports the appropriate ICC color profiles using this test image. One other really neat feature of Photoshop CS5 (and maybe other editors too, I don't know) is that it will actually show you what parts of your image won't translate color spaces well; if you press Ctrl+Shift+Y, or go to View->Gamut Warning, it will highlight in grey the colors of the open image that don't exist in the target color space. I've found this to be somewhat useful.

Answered by David

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Why do my prints look different from what I see on my computer monitor?

Question

I haven't printed any of my photos yet but I decided to give it a try. I am thinking of getting a printer of my own but before that I wanted to see how they would look. So, I simply printed one at the office in the regular laser printer.

To my surprise the printed picture looked very different from what I see in the computer monitor. Can anyone tell me how can the colors look so different? Basically, they have lost their saturation and in some cases the yellows are orange etc. Also, do I need to look for anything in particular in a printer that I am planning to buy? Are printers for photographs different from regular printers?

Asked by sfactor

Answer

Color laser printers, especially the big high end office printers, have the color capabilities you need for printing the company logo and the occasional Excel pie chart — but they are truly bad for printing photos.

But the good news is that almost any of the current generation of ink jet printers, even the cheap ones, are pretty good at printing photos - but only if you print in the printer's high quality setting on photo paper, if you use the cheap office paper you will get the same desaturated colors you got at the office.

Now, the colors in print will never be the same as on screen, especially the brightness (because the screen is a light source and he paper isn't) but you can get good results results, here are the options depending on how accurate you want the colors to be:

1. Just print in high quality on photo paper

If you like the way colors look an screen right out of camera and you never calibrated your screen than it's likely you won't notice the problem from uncalibrated printer (but it will never be the same as on screen).

This should be good enough for most people and will probably match the results you get when you get the photos printed in cheap labs.

2. Calibrate your monitor

If you're serious about getting the right colors you first need to make sure what you see on screen is really what's in the file, this will probably get you predictable results (that is, the difference between screen and printer will be predictable and you can learn to compensate).

There are several systems that will let you calibrate monitors, some are not very expensive.

This should be enough for most serious hobbyists and pros

3. Use name brand paper that has profiles available

The next step is to use good paper and get printer profiles for that paper you are using.

4. Calibrate your printer

The next step is to get a device that can calibrate both your screen and your specific printer with the specific printer you are using.

Those are definitely not cheap and this should be good enough for everyone.

5. Know when to stop

This rabbit hole goes very deep, if you want truly accurate color you might find yourself in a black shirt (to avoid reflection) in a room with gray walls and special balanced lights (to avoid color casts) manually adjusting color space conversions.

Answered by Nir

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Can I use a Pantone Huey for multiple computers?

Question

Can one device be used to calibrate several PCs? Can the PCs then be used at the same time?

Do I need to have the device plugged in during normal use, or once the monitor is calibrated can I disconnect it?

Asked by Paolo

Answer

You can calibrate a number of computer/monitor combinations, but only the one that the device is attached to can have the ambient light adjustment. Basically, it will "tweak" the profile according to light conditions which, in theory, keeps the display better calibrated. In practice, I didn't find it to matter that much as long as you kept up with a good recalibration frequency.

Answered by John Cavan

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Can I use a Pantone Huey for multple computers?

Question

Can one device be used to calibrate several pc? Can then the pcs be used at the same time?

Do I need to have the device plugged during normal use, or once the monitor is calibrated I can disconnect it?

Asked by Paolo

Answer

You can calibrate a number of computer/monitor combinations, but only the one that the device is attached to can have the ambient light adjustment. Basically, it will "tweak" the profile according to light conditions which, in theory, keeps the display better calibrated. In practice, I didn't find it to matter that much as long as you kept up with a good recalibration frequency.

Answered by John Cavan

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Can calibrating my laptop monitor remove the need to buy a better monitor?

Question

I have a rather cheap HP laptop. I use it for retouching my photos. I have experienced a huge difference in final colors between this laptop and a Samsung LCD monitor, which I think is better.

To be able to achieve the good results that can be easily seen on many 500px photos (I mean not top notch, but still correct and pleasant):

1. Do I need to calibrate my current HP laptop monitor? The colors and brightness vary quite a bit with little angle variations, so the monitor is not so great ,I think.
2. Can I use a non calibrated better monitor (in that case any price/model example would be great)?
3. Do I need to buy a better monitor and calibrate it?

Asked by Paolo

Answer

Laptop monitors are universally bad with a few exceptions. You likely have a normal low contrast, low gamut, poor viewing angle TN panel. You can calibrate these (I strongly recommend a color meter for this), but there is only so much you can do. At best it will be consistent in color temperature and feel to your desktop monitor.

Calibrating the desktop monitor would allow you a good editing platform. It's not a prograde monitor, but will be consistent in response. If you do corrections to color, contrast, saturation for viewing or printing, it will help prevent unpleasant surprises.

Answered by theatrus

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Color correction and calibrated monitor

Question

I have a rather cheap HP laptop. I use it for retouching my photos. I have experienced a huge difference in final colors between this laptop and a Samsung LCD monitor, which I think is better.

To be able to achieve the good results that can be easily seen on many 500px photos (I mean not top notch, but still correct and pleasant):

1. Do I need to calibrate my current HP laptop monitor? The colors and brightness vary quite a bit with little angle variations, so the monitor is not so great ,I think.
2. Can I use a non calibrated better monitor (in that case any price/model example would be great)?
3. Do I need to buy a better monitor and calibrate it?

Asked by Paolo

Answer

Laptop monitors are universally bad with a few exceptions. You likely have a normal low contrast, low gamut, poor viewing angle TN panel. You can calibrate these (I strongly recommend a color meter for this), but there is only so much you can do. At best it will be consistent in color temperature and feel to your desktop monitor.

Calibrating the desktop monitor would allow you a good editing platform. It's not a prograde monitor, but will be consistent in response. If you do corrections to color, contrast, saturation for viewing or printing, it will help prevent unpleasant surprises.

Answered by theatrus

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How do I calibrate two different monitors to the same whitepoint?

Question

A few days ago I invested in an X-Rite i1 Display 2 colourometer, as per this answer, although I'm having great difficulty getting a Dell U2412M and a Dell E1911 monitor to the same whitepoint. I've tried the software that the device came with and a demo of another piece of software (I can't recall the name unfortunately). I have settled on a piece of free software called Argyll CMS along with the GUI frontend dispcalGUI, as it seems a little more capable; however, this is simply my impression of it.

I'm aware that there will be differences in quality between the U2412M and the E1911, although I'd have thought that after calibrating the monitor and creating a high quality profile for both monitors that the difference would be next to impossible to detect with the eyes. However, there is a very noticable difference in the colours the two monitors show. The U2412M seems to have a slight red tinge to it, while the E1911 has seems more of a grey tinge.

The calibration settings I've used for both monitors is as follows:

Whitepoint: 6500K
White level: 120cd/m2
Black level: Native
Tone curve: 2.2
Calibration quality: High
Profile quality: High
Profile type: Curves + matrix
Testchart file: Large testchart for "curves + matrix" profiles.

I have control of the brightness, contrast and individual RGB channels, so I'm able to calibrate the monitor before using a profile. I've put up links to the profile verification reports for the U2412M and the E1911. You can see that each monitor seems to struggle with particularly blue colours.

Obviously there is no way you can see the actual colours displayed by the monitors, but as I said, it is quite a noticable difference. I know this is a little open-ended, but could anybody suggest what may be going wrong here, or have I just got bad quality monitors?

Asked by R4D4

Answer

I used to work for Gretag MacBeth (and later X-Rite when they acquired Gretag.) I've written code for color monitor calibration. Your calibrator is defective and it should not do that. Sadly, the color filters in the unit itself may not ever be able to calibrate your monitor. My i1Display will not calibrate my MacBook monitor... I would contact X-Rite and see if they'll take it back or replace it.

The X-Rite ColorMunki was in development when I left there. It may be a better choice but if I recall it is pretty expensive.

Answered by Paul Cezanne

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What steps to take to match screen to print?

Question

I don't print a TON of my photos, but when I do it's because it's really important to me. I've got a MacBook Pro attached to a Samsung 2300 display and an HP Photosmart 7760 printer. I typically use Lightroom for OSX, but occasionally will make use of Aperture if the mood strikes.

What steps should I take to ensure that my print matches what I see when editing the photo? I've got a monitor calibrator, so I'm using the calibrated display profile. What do I need to do with my printer or Lightroom, though? Should Lightroom, the printer, or something else manage the color profile?

I'm looking at buying a much higher quality printer (Canon Pixma Pro) but want to make sure I know how to get the most out of my prints before I spend any money.

Asked by Shadowman

Answer

Calibration

First off, the obvious stuff: Calibrate your monitor, and use appropriate ICC profiles for your printer/ink/papers. You mentioned you already have a calibrated monitor, and for the most part, you should be able to find quality ICC profiles for your printer and the papers you use on the net (I use a Canon PIXMA 9500Pro myself, and make use of a very wide variety of papers...there have only been a couple occasions where I've had to generate my own profile.)

Soft Proofing

Having a calibrated screen and proper printer ICC profiles is a good start, but it is generally not enough alone. To really match what you see in print to what you see on screen, you need to soft proof. Lightroom 4 Beta brings some basic soft proofing tools to the table, however for some of the best, you should really turn to Photoshop. Photoshop has some amazing capabilities when your soft proofing that help you properly match your print to what you see on screen.

Screen/Printer Differences

Even with proper calibration, there are still some fundamental differences between a computer screen and a printer. The most obvious is the fact that screens are luminously transmissive, emitting RGB light, which conforms to the additive color model; conversely, printers are reflective, producing light by reflecting CMYK (and possibly many more) colors from ink on paper, which conforms to the subtractive color model. Because computer screens are transmissive, they tend to have greater dynamic range, and often larger gamut (although the gap is closing these days with special papers and advanced inks.)

The difference in color model and emission can create a visible difference in a print from what you see on screen, even when everything is properly calibrated. Print will generally be duller, and even with the best inks, bright primary and secondary color saturation will rarely reach the same levels as possible on screen. Similarly, maximum black and brightest white are limited by ink formula and density and paper brightness, respectively. With a modern wide-gamut printer like a PIXMA Pro, color gamut correction will probably be less of an issue than white and black point correction.

Correcting for Print

If you want maximum accuracy when you print, there are a few things you can do before hand. First and foremost is to make sure you have the best ICC profile you can find for your printer and paper. Second, make sure you select the right ICM Rendering Intent before printing or soft proofing. Generally, Perceptual will maintain the perception of print-to-screen accuracy, and is probably recommended. If actual-color accuracy is more important than perceptual accuracy, you may want to switch to Relative Colorimetric.

Before printing, you should create a printer, paper and print size specific copy of your photo. Once you have this copy, final and manual resizing and sharpening for the exact print size/border size you want should be performed. You can always leave sizing up to the printer, but the results are usually unpredictable. Save this copy before proceeding to soft proof.

Enable soft proofing in Photoshop, and make sure you choose to adjust black point, simulate paper, and pick the correct ICC print profile and ICM rendering intent. You should see your image change, probably become a bit duller, and be rendered on a different color background that should approximate your paper. If there is a large deviation in the simulated paper vs. your real paper, you might want to try creating an ICC screen profile that improves matching. (Personally, I use the DataColor Spyder Elite, which includes a utility to easily switch color profiles. I have a variety of color profiles that I can switch to with different white points, so I can quickly match my work environment to my paper...or at least get a better match.)

Once in soft proofing mode, the first thing you will want to look at is white and black point. I start with blacks, and use the hot key to enable/disable soft proofing. A fair amount of the time, fine detail in blacks will disappear when soft proofing against a specific print profile. Sometimes, you may see fine black detail is too bright, although its rarer. You can correct this with the levels tool by tweaking the minimum black or black point. Similarly, if you see any highlights that are blown out in soft proof only, you can correct this by using the levels tool to shift white point down. You can actually adjust most settings while soft proofing is enabled, to see the results directly. Any adjustments made while soft proofing will persist, so when soft proofing is disabled, it you'll still see their effects on the image itself.

If you are printing on a paper or with inks that have a particularly limited gamut, you may want to check out of gamut colors as well. You can do this in soft proofing mode, and it will highlight areas of your image in gray that have color values beyond the capabilities of your printer. Generally speaking, if you only see minor spots where gamut is out, and you are using relative colorimetric or perceptual rendering intents, you can leave everything as is...ICM will take care of it all for you. If you see large areas of your print out of gamut, you might want to spend some time either printing test images to see how the out of gamut colors actually render, and if they do render incorrectly, you might want to try correcting them in soft proofing mode. There are a variety of techniques for correcting out of gamut color...I'll leave researching those as an exercise for the reader. The simplest approach is to adjust range-limited saturation down a bit to bring colors back into gamut (although that can have its own side effects.) For the most part, outside of extreme cases, let ICM deal with correcting color for you.

Finally, I highly recommend you make all adjustments using adjustment layers in photoshop, rather than directly. You can always disable them that way, compare differences with various adjustments enabled or not, easily toggle adjustments for different test prints, etc.

Answered by jrista

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Which color settings to chose in Photoshop and Aperture with an Epson SPR2880 printer

Question

My workflow consists of importing photos into Apple Aperture, where I do most of my editing. Sometimes, I edit the photo in Photoshop. Aperture can automatically create a .psd file based on my edited image, and include that in its own library. The final results gets printed on an Epson Stylus Photo R2880 printer.

In the Aperture settings, I can select which color space to use when generating the .psd file. As I have set it up right now I use 16bit and ProPhoto RGB color space.

However, when opening up the color utility, I can see that some of the glossy paper color profiles for the printer contains colors that are not inside the ProPhoto RGB color space. This is mainly blue and purple nuances in the black area that are outside the scope of the ProPhoto RGB color space.

What puzzles me is that the icc profiles for my printer, an Epson Stylus Photo R2880 are not CMYK, but RGB profiles, I am wondering if I should choose one of the color profiles for that printer when exporting to PhotoShop. The annoying part about that setup is that I would have to go into Aperture preferences and select the export color space based on the papertype I wish to print on before opening an image in Photoshop.

What also puzzles me is the fact that the icc profiles for the printer use the RGB, not the CMYK, color space. Although the printer does have 8 instead of 4 types of ink instead of 4, it is still based on subtractive color, as opposed to additive color that the RGB space is.

I'm quite new to the entire color management thing, and I want to set up my system to be able to generate predictable prints, and also fully utilizing the capabilities of my printer, e.g. I can see by comparing the color profile of my monitor with the color profile of the printer that the printer by far exceeds the monitors capabilities in producing very saturated green and blue colors.

My primary workstation is an iMac, on which I have calibrated the display using a x-rite Colormunki.

Asked by Pete

Answer

Working color spaces and print color spaces are distinct, separate things. Generally speaking, you never want to directly apply a print profile to an image. The purpose of ICM is to utilize ICC profiles to describe what needs to be done when moving content from one device to another. You NEED to keep your photos tagged with an RGB ICC profile that properly describes the image in the RGB space, and you NEED to select an additional ICC profile that properly describes the capabilities of the printer. The ICM engine will then (normally) figure out how to adjust colors...according to your selected rendering intent...from the RGB space to the printer space.

To demonstrate my workflow, I generally do the following:

1. Do primary processing in the largest RGB color space I can (normally ProPhotoRGB).
2. Create a copy of my primary working image, and convert to an RGB color space that as closely matches the gamut of the print as possible.
   • This may be sRGB if the paper is a limiting factor.
   • This is often AdobeRGB, as my Canon PIXMA Pro9500 II supports a gamut that largely covers the AdobeRGB gamut
3. Manually scale the print copy to the exact dimensions necessary to accommodate my print.
   • If printing at 300ppi @ 19x13", I would scale and crop the image to 5700x3900 pixels.
   • Perform any print sharpening necessary to bring out desired detail
   • Preview at "print size" using the zoom tool (make sure you configure Photoshop with an accurate screen PPI...the Apple CinemaDisplay 30" has a 103ppi resolution)
4. Soft-proof the print in Photoshop, by selecting the appropriate printer ICC profile that matches the printer AND paper I intend to use
   • First and most importantly, I try to adjust black and white point to lie within the limits of the print gamut
   • If necessary, more so when using Relative Colorimetric rendering intent than Perceptual rendering intent, fix out-of-gamut color (search the web for a variety of techniques for this)
5. Print, leaving the image profile what I selected in step 2, and selecting the same ICC print profile as in step 4

I want to stress at least checking the white and black points when in soft-proofing mode. Using a Perceptual rendering intent when printing will usually do a pretty good job, but its easy to lose a lot of tonality in the shades and sometimes in the highlights if you don't adjust them for the specific printer and paper you intend to print on. Adjusting them in soft-proofing mode ahead of time helps maximize tonality for print. Generally speaking, you don't need to worry about out of gamut colors if you convert to an RGB space that closely matches the printer space. With modern Epson printers, that is probably closer to AdobeRGB than sRGB. If you prefer to use Colorimetric Rendering intent, then you might want to learn some techniques to fix out of gamut colors before printing, to maximize your control over color quality and minimize posterization.

Finally, once you have tuned the print copy for the specific paper and printer, save it with all your adjustments. You should be able to print from it as many times as you need with predictable results. If you ever need to print on a different printer, paper, and paper size, you should redo steps 1-4 above for each one, and save a separate copy off for each.

Answered by jrista

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Does embedding an ICC profile into an image actually embed the entirety of that profile into an image?

Question

This is very much a imaging question, but Photography looked like the best site to ask.

I've been reading information about ICC, color spaces, JPEG metadata, and the like trying to understand this.

When an application 'embeds' a color/ICC profile into an image, like a JPEG, does that actually embed the entire ICC Profile? If I saved a photo with the sRGB or Adobe RGB color profiles embedded, does that mean color-aware applications will:

1. Open the image
2. Extract the profile data (i.e. it sees the image is AdobeRGB)
3. Apply transformations on the color using the information from the profile
4. Display the image

My confusion comes from inspecting a bunch of photos I have - I viewed their metadata with exiftool, and this snippet of information came out:

Color Space                     : sRGB
Profile CMM Type                : Lino
Profile Version                 : 2.1.0
Profile Class                   : Display Device Profile
Color Space Data                : RGB
CMM Flags                       : Not Embedded, Independent <--- does anything use this?
Device Manufacturer             : IEC
Device Model                    : sRGB
Device Attributes               : Reflective, Glossy, Positive, Color
Rendering Intent                : Perceptual
Connection Space Illuminant     : 0.9642 1 0.82491
Profile Description             : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
Device Mfg Desc                 : IEC http://www.iec.ch
Device Model Desc               : IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB colour space - sRGB

So this photo has an sRGB profile, that's fine. But what is the CMM Flags field for and does anyone use it?

The ICC standard, in section 7.2.11, says the CMM field data indicates this this:

The profile flags field shall contain flags to indicate various hints for the CMM such as distributed processing and caching options

Position 0 - Embedded profile (0 if not embedded, 1 if embedded in file)

Position 1 - Profile cannot be used independently of the embedded color data

---

So condensed to a couple related questions:

1. Does embedding an ICC profile into an image actually embed the entirety of that profile into an image? Or does it only serve to tell color-aware applications to look for that profile in the system (i.e. Windows' ICC directory)

2. Am I just confused and the CMM Flags are independent of the notion of embedding an ICC profile?

Thanks, I hope my question is clear enough.

Asked by birryree

Answer

The CMM Flags field is referring to Color Management Module flags. In this case, its saying that the ICC profile the JPEG image is tagged with is not embedded. It is possible, although not required, to embed ICC profiles within images, including JPEG images (as according to the very document you linked:)

B.4 Embedding ICC profiles in JPEG files

The JPEG standard (ISO/IEC 10918-1[2]) supports application specific data segments. These segments may be used for tagging images with ICC profiles. The APP2 marker is used to introduce the ICC profile tag. Given that there are only 15 supported APP markers, there is a chance of many applications using the same marker. ICC tags are thus identified by beginning the data with a special null terminated byte sequence, “ICC_PROFILE”.

The length field of a JPEG marker is only two bytes long; the length of the length field is included in the total. Hence, the values 0 and 1 are not legal lengths. This would limit the maximum data length to 65 533. The identification sequence would lower this even further. As it is quite possible for an ICC profile to be longer than this, a mechanism is required to break the profile into chunks and place each chunk in a separate marker. A mechanism to identify each chunk in sequence order is therefore necessary.

The identifier sequence is followed by one byte indicating the sequence number of the chunk (counting starts at 1) and one byte indicating the total number of chunks. All chunks in the sequence should indicate the same total number of chunks. The 1-byte chunk count limits the size of embeddable profiles to 16 707 345 bytes.

Generally speaking, I think images are usually only tagged with ICC profiles, rather than having them embedded, when associated with sRGB, AdobeRGB, or one of the other very common color spaces. It may be necessary to embed a profile if it is a custom profile, one that you do not expect to exist on the machines the image will generally be viewed on.

Answered by jrista

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Should I perform the final color space conversion before or after final sharpening of an image?

Question

When preparing an image for the web (or other media), the last two steps is usually to resize the image to the desired resolution and sharpen it at that resolution. However, when working in a larger/different color space than the final result is going to be exported in, when should I convert to the target color space relative to these two operations?

Answer

My last steps, in order, are resize, sharpen, convert color space from ProRGB to sRGB, convert to 8-bit.

The only really critical orders are sharpening after resizing and changing to 8-bit after changing the color space.

In fact, I was curious, so I just tried. One copy, I did my above steps. On the other copy, I converted color space, converted to 8-bit and then resized and sharpend. I put the images over each other and changed the blending mode to difference.

There was absolutely no pixel level difference between the two. I expect to see a few minor differences at 100% that would never show up on the print, but in the case of this one particular photo, there were absolutely no differences at all.

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Why don't you need to calibrate a camera's LCD screen?

Question

I saw this question from Leon Neal on Twitter a while back:

If a computer screen needs constant calibration and checks, how come the screens on our cameras lack that facility?

I can think of a few potential answers but I'm not sure any of them completely cover it:

1. Because it's too small to be used for fully accurate work anyway (so near enough is good enough).
2. Because it's only for previewing, not for editing.
3. Because it's not usually the last screen we view a photo on: it's normally going to be copied onto a computer so colour management can be left until later.

However if you think of a press photographer at a news event, perhaps shooting JPEG for speed and filing the pictures over the air straight from the camera to a news desk, then none of those reasons really hold water. Surely they have a valid need to check that the camera's colour reproduction is faithful?

So: is it in fact possible to calibrate a camera's LCD? If so, why do so few of us bother? And if not, why not?

Answer

Two words: "ambient" and "context".

At the risk of making what sounds like a "No true Scotsman" argument, "real" monitor calibration is always in the context of the ambient lighting conditions. Not only do the pertinent standards (ISO 12647 and related) specify the lighting levels and colour temperatures under which critical colour work should be performed, pro-level calibration devices sample the ambient light as well as what's coming from the monitor. Since both the actual value of the max black and the apparent value of the max white depend on the ambient lighting, you can't really make even the basic global contrast adjustment without regard to ambient. (And if you are calibrating your monitor under one set of lighting conditions and using it under another, you're fooling yourself -- you're not really doing that much better than an educated eyeball calibration would have gotten you.)

In terms of actual calibration, then, you would pretty much need to do a fresh calibration every time you look at the LCD (or, at least, for every shooting session). And you'd have to hold the camera at the same angle under the same lighting every time you used that profile (or get used to using a sealed viewing environment, like a HoodLoupe or a dark cloth/viewing tent). If you have time to be messing about like that, you're probably not shooting breaking news or sports action.

Recent cameras will allow you to do an educated eyeball calibration, at least within the limits of the device. All you need is a reference image on the card. But unless the screen is way out of whack, I'm not convinced of the utility of anything other than the basic brightness setting (which is a contrast setting in the context of ambient lighting). If you can count the number of mireds you are off by on one hand, you won't be able to tell the difference without an external reference anyway, and I don't recall running across any cameras that allow you to manually adjust gamma conversion curves and so on in-camera (although many of the better ones will let you create your own presets externally and import them to the camera).

We have ways of calibrating the capture instead, which is of far greater utility. That includes things like setting a white balance (auto, camera presets, or custom, all with fine tuning for preferred deviations like warmth), including calibration targets (from a simple grey card to more comprehensive targets like a ColorChecker or SpyderCube) in images, global and channel histograms and blinkies (highlight warnings). And if the colours really are that critical (say for advertisement product photography), you're almost always going to be using a "colour to target" tool in post to match a Pantone specification anyway.

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Why doesn't Aperture show black as black?

Question

Aperture seems to be displaying my images brighter than they actually are -- this makes colors seem washed out and makes it very difficult to accurately adjust the black point and other exposure parameters.

Here's a screenshot:

Notice that the loupe (set to the same magnification as the zoomed-in image) is more saturated, and blacks are blacker than the surrounding image.

Also compare the bottom edge of the image to the black strip just below it.

This happens even for totally black images, and is independent of any image adjustments:

Why is Aperture messing with my colors like this? How can I fix it?

Answer

You've accidentally turned on Onscreen Proofing, which is used to simulate the colors of a final output medium like CMYK ink on paper. Turn it off by going to the View menu and clicking Onscreen Proofing, or hitting Option-Shift-P

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What's the best way to calibrate my wide-gamut display used with two different computer systems?

Question

I have a Dell U2410 monitor hooked up to two computers: a Windows machine via HDMI, and my MacBook Pro (running Lion) via DisplayPort.

The output from Windows is great: colours are true and text is sharp as a tack, but from my Mac it's a bit different. The colours differ from what is shown on my MacBook's display and anti-aliasing on text is a bit dodgy.

I'm a complete newbie here, so I was hoping someone could give me some tips on calibrating this display to get it to display with high fidelity to what's appearing on my MacBook display. (Software/hardware) tools, techniques, etc.

Answer

Unfortunately, the monitor you have cannot be H/W calibrated and I have no idea what it does with its internal LUTs. You have two options at this point:

1. Return it for a calibratable monitor. My recommendation is the NEC P241W which I own two off (New they are $450 but I about them refurbished for $237) in addition to one of NEC's 30" model (LCD3090WQXi).
2. Calibrate the display on each computer and that means finding a H/W Calibrator solution which works on both platforms. There is a good description of calibration (and miscalibration) for your specific display here. It even says that banding issues are minimal which is great considering that you have to calibrate at the graphics card level.

Never used that display but if it is calibratable as the technical specs suggest, then you only need to calibrate it once to the sRGB color space and make sure the color profiles of both machines specify sRGB.

To calibrate it you need a color-calibrator, I use NEC Spectra View but I suppose Spyder 3 (as already suggested by @dpollitt) will do as well. The only thing you have to make sure is that you are calibrating the display, not the graphics card. Otherwise you have to calibrate twice and will have banding and perhaps even inconsistencies, particularly considering you use HDMI on Windows.

Now, if you want to take advantage of non-sRGB colors, you can but it will be more work. Also, only color-managed application will show color colors. Everything else, including most web-browser (color management is supported by some modern browsers but there is no guaranty since files often come with the wrong profile) will show distorted colors.

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How do I check for slightly off white colour on an IPS monitor?

Question

Hey everyone I recently took some shot of a model wearing my products against a white roll of paper. They turned out great but of course I had to do adjustments. Anyways the issue I'm having is the image looks great but I'm pasting it on top of a pure white canvas in photoshop - the background of the image looks white and I can't tell its off white on my IPS screen.

If I go on my laptop and look at it at normally it is slightly discolored but looking at it at an angle I can see that the white in the picture is clearly off.

My question is how do I edit the picture so I can see these blemishes on a higher quality screen?

Answer

As I understand it, you have photographed the products against a white background. I guess you're extracting the product from that background and pasting onto a true RGB(255,255,255) pure white background in photoshop. I think what you're saying is that you have some areas from the original background which isn't pure white, and those don't blend in with the pure white background?

If so, and the original has a color tint, and you want it to be pure white, then before extracting the product from the original background, use a curves adjustment layer, and use the white eyedropper and select part of the background and that should correct the color cast, and will also bring that part of the background close to pure white so it matches the background you're pasting on.

Answering your question more directly I think, once you have the image pasted on the pure white background, if you want to check it, I would use a levels adjustment layer. Move the midtone (middle) slider almost all the way to the right. This will increase contrast in the lightest tones and show you places where you don't have matching whites. You could also use a threshhold adjustment layer. Find spots, paint them over with a white brush or mask them off, then throw away the levels/threshhold layer when you're done.

I hope I've understood the question. If not, clarify :)

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How can I prevent photos losing vibrancy when printed?

Question

I take a number of landscape photos which I then do quite a bit of post production work with in photoshop elements 9. When I take them to my local photographic shop (I am not talking Boots etc) and get them back they have lost much of their vibrancy and mood. I spoke to the owner and he said that is because they can never recreate the colour on modern laptops/desktops? Is this right? Do I need to go and buy an old screen to mimic what is happening at the developers? He did mention that I could download an application that could imitate various printers. What is this? Anyone else with this issue? Would welcome any advice

Answer

You can ask the shop for its printer color profile or try to find it online. Then you can see how your printed pictures will look on your screen. E.g this links gives printer profile for costco printers.

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How does a display calibration device like the Spyder 3 work?

Question

I was looking up information about monitor calibration and came across the Spyder 3 Express, Pro, and Elite.

How does the Spyder 3 work to calibrate your monitor correctly?

Answer

These hardware calibration devices work by running a piece of software on the computer that displays a series of colors and grey levels. By placing the spyder reading device on the computer monitor, it is able to "see" what the computer is displaying. By taking a series of measurements, a profile of the total system including video drivers and monitor quirks can be assessed. Once this profile is built, it is usually loaded into the OS so that the monitor then displays calibrated image colors.

The differences between the product line usually covers how many monitors can be calibrated for each computer to accommodate multi-screen setups.

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How can I evaluate the colour accuracy of my photos?

Question

I have noticed that the colours in my photos are quite dependant on the medium on which I am viewing them — the camera LCD, computer monitor, TV, digital photo frame and print. So, something that looks good on the camera LCD may end up looking quite different on print or even on a monitor, the range can vary quite a bit across the media. Is there any way to better judge the colour accuracy of a photo? Shooting RAW over JPEG should make a difference, I suppose.

Also, along these lines, since the premium lenses are supposed to have better colour reproduction, such a tool\method could also be used to evaluate lenses.

Answer

If there's nothing in the picture which provides known, measured reference colors, this is very hard after the fact.

If your image does include reference colors, you can sample them and measure how different they are from the standard. Xrite sells the somewhat-traditional Gretag Macbeth targets, or you can buy more affordable calibration targets produced by Wolf Faust. These targets have a wide range of different colors, because adjusting balance to get reddish-browns more accurate may come at the expense of greenish-blues (for example.)

Even if the image isn't displayed accurately on your monitor, you can use the reference data provided with the color samples to calculate the deviation from ideal for the different colors, as Imaging Resource does in their tests. One would use software like Imatest or DxO Analyzer to do this evaluation. I'm aware of plenty of various other software (including free/open source options) for building device profiles from a reference, but I'm not sure of anything else that gives an analysis of error from ideal.

If you color-calibrate your monitor and use an entirely color-managed workflow, you can be more confidant that the image you see with your eyes represents reality as well.

You may also be interested in evaluating your own ability to judge differences between colors — if you have a high degree of color acuity, you may be more confident in trusting your perceptions (assuming a color-calibrated monitor — or a monitor or print that is the final output), perhaps compared to actually looking at the real scene. There are, of course, serious tests used by eye doctors, but I also recently learned (from here) about a neat online test that you might want to try: the FM 100 Hue Test.

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How can I get accurate photo colors on a laptop screen?

Question

My editing mainly involves these things:

1. Adjusting the colors, white balance , brightness (slightly , to get that subtle combination)
2. Cropping of the images.

I have recently bought a laptop and I am editing photos in that.
The problem which I am facing is this that the picture looks different on the laptop when screen on the laptop is moved a little back and forth.

How do I adjust colors in that case, and how can I be sure that the image looks the same on all desktops and laptops — if not 100%, at least to some extent, like 80-90%?

Bottom line involves calibrating I suppose, but while editing in laptop screens, how do I make sure that what I am looking at is a correct representation of the image?

Any techniques to use without investing in any external hardware would be particularly useful.

Answer

It is pretty much impossible, although you can get closer.

At the very least you need a color-calibration device. Using that device you calibrate your screen so that the colors it can show are close to how they should be. Most laptop displays sadly only show 60-75% of sRGB color, so there can be up to 40% of colors you cannot see in the laptop. Instead they get substituted for another color. It can make it very surprising when you see your image elsewhere.

Even if you get a top-quality laptop like a Thinkpad W700 which has a color-calibration device built-in, you still only get 84% sRGB coverage which is on par with crappy monitors and yet costs a fortune.

Ideally, you would get a color-calibratable display and hook it to your laptop while you do any work which has to do with colors. The are relatively cheap these days and I know you can get the NEC P221W for under $450, so they are definitely affordable now. If that is too expensive, look for it refurbished (I bought 2 of those for $237 each like that). This is the cheapest wide-gamut display I know and covers 100% of sRGB and 96% of AdobeRGB color spaces, it also supports 10-bit internal LUTs which reduces calibration artifacts.

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