What do we need to know?
Do we need to be able to bake bread in order to be able to taste and eat it?
NO!
Did we need to be, in the old day's of wet darkroom printing, a chemist?
NO!
It is the same with digital colour management!
Do we need to be able to bake bread in order to be able to taste and eat it?
NO!
Did we need to be, in the old day's of wet darkroom printing, a chemist?
NO!
It is the same with digital colour management!
Is digital colour management difficult?
Of course not an easy question, but to a certain extent we believe that most of the problems our customers experience are caused by using inexpensive colour management hard- and software.
We are convinced that in the world of digital colour management there is no such thing as high value for low money. There is no middle way! You do it (properly), or you don't bother at all. Finding the cheapest solution will not do the job.
Basically it all comes down to:
1. Getting your monitor calibrated and profiled
2. Getting your printer profiled. Using either the standard drivers supplied with the printer or using advanced software Rip drivers like Shiraz or ColorByte.
3. View your prints under a light source (viewing booth) which has a visual white point match with the white point at which your monitor is calibrated.
4. Take care of your environment: Make sure that not much light is falling on your screen: We prefer a room as dark as possible (the digital darkroom!) and with not too much colour on the walls in your room either!
More on Colour Management
We try to explain this as simply as possible from a practical point of view:
What is a profile doing?
For example: A (printer) profile will help to make visible as far as possible with the present technology what the digital file is about within the printable colour gamut from a particular paper, ink and printer combination.
It still does not mean that at this stage you would be able to see the same on your screen! It does not mean that your screen will be matched with just a printer profile!
We need to take a few more steps in order to reach our goal:
We need to calibrate and profile our monitor as well.
What it does and what it doesn't:
The monitor calibration and profiling are doing similar things to the printer profiling: making visible as far as possible with the present technology what the digital file contains.
The monitor calibration does not have any effect on the digital file itself: we only see it differently, depending on whether the monitor is calibrated properly or not. The same digital file will print very much the same on any printer (using a similar ink and paper) on condition that a printer is properly profiled, no matter in what condition your monitor is in, no matter whether they are properly calibrated or not.
Changing the settings of a screen will not change the digital file itself either.
Calibration and profiling of a monitor is most important as soon as one starts to edit a file. If the monitor colour balance is not correct, certain colours will be over emphasised and others under. In case the monitor’s white point is far too cold, we might over compensate for blue and as a result a printed image might become too warm.
Once we start editing a file, we need to see what we are doing, otherwise the corrections we apply will be (could be) very different from what we see on screen and we can’t predict how the file has changed and how it will print.
The biggest mistake we see is: Matching a monitor to a print. If we do this and our printer is out of balance, we bring our screen out of balance as well.
We have considered the first step of profiling the monitor. The second step is profiling the printer and the third step is holding the prints under a light source which is coming as close as possible towards to white point and illuminated at which the monitor is calibrated.
Graphics industry standard - 5000K
The graphics industry standard is 5000K, which we would like to describe as warm daylight. This light (industry standard) is used to create images for magazines which are acceptable for any viewing condition. We stress: acceptable, because images will look warmer or cooler depending on the light source under which they are viewed. Optimising images for a viewing condition which is nearly in between tungsten and daylight will result in the best possible compromise, knowing that magazines (and the images in them) will be viewed under any viewing condition)
Monitor white point calibration at 6000K?
Out of experience we discovered that with most monitors 6000K gives us the closest visual white point match with our screens. For that reason we mostly calibrate our screens at 6000K in order to have a white point as close as possible towards the light in our own viewing booth’s (with 5000K!)
About the Viewing booth!
It is very important to use a viewing booth with high quality tubes. We discovered that many so called photographic daylight tubes are in most cases far too cool and the spectrum of the light is not very regular. With many tubes we might see peaks in certain areas of the spectrum. This means that certain colours are over emphasised and others under. Again we see here the danger of sometimes getting a match and sometimes not, whilst we try to achieve predictability for any printable colour!
