About Atmos Design

Udo Machiels, of Atmos Design, has been involved for many years in professional photography and interior colour design.   He studied Art college in the Netherlands  more than 20 years ago and specialiced in Photography.   For this reason he is very familiar with the old-fashioned wet-dark room technology and is having a feel for what kind of image quality photographers are looking for.  But photography was not the only art-form he was having as a profession.

For a period of 4 years Udo had a contract with the ING bank in the Netherlands to design and apply onsite a multi-coloured walls effect for many of the ING bank branches (please have a look at: http://www.atmosuk.co.uk) 

It was when Udo was looking to advertise his own decorative effect work that he encountered a phenomenal amount of problems trying to get a true representation of his original work in print.  It was simply impossible to achieve his goal with using film and prints coming from the best professional labs in both the UK and the Netherlands.   For that reason he bought his first computer in the late 90’s and looked to digital imaging to solve his problems not knowing the immense difficulties he would encounter with digital imaging. During the Udo's first year of experimentation, it seemed nearly impossible to get consistent and reliable results from scanning medium format negatives.  Udo's reason for using negative film at that time was that is gives a higher dynamic range than using positive film or colour slides which is needed for taking interior pictures.

Using high-end digital camera’s was at that time extremely expensive;  The Kodak High-end digital camera’s ( http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/kodakdcs620x/page2.asp) cost around $10,000 and the digital back’s were even more expensive.

An amazing amount of paper and ink was wasted  and ended up in the bin, not to mention all the time which was involved to get a few decent prints. But in every problem lies an opportunity.

Udo started with a simple desktop Hewlett Packard printer, but soon discovered that the colour rendering changed every time he changed cartridges, so he stopped using this printer.  The next step was buying (what he thought at that time) a professional colour proofer and on the recommendation of Epson he did not buy the Epson 5000 but instead bought the Epson 5500 only to find out that the prints made with these genuine pigmented Epson inks (called colorfast ink) shifted dramatically towards olive green in daylight viewing conditions and towards magenta in tungsten light viewing conditions.  In order to get rid of the olive green cast, he decided to buy his first colour management package containing a hardware measuring device and colour management software to generate monitor and printer profiles.  Although this package did cost over £2,000, it is still ‘sitting’ in his cupboard and not doing anything since the profiles generated with this package did give results anything better than using the standard generic Epson profiles.

Having spend now over £5,000, Udo still did not have a proper solution.

Having done a lot of research of what is available on the market, Udo decided to invest in what he thinks is probably one of the best packages on the market:  The Iprofile bundle from Gretagmacbeth containing the Spectrolino / SpectroscanT table and ProfileMaker pro software costing at that time around £8,000.   This investment changed what was going on in his own studio. Instead of not being able to ‘manage’ colour, this equipment allowed him to test materials and push each product (printers / papers / inks ) to it’s own limits.

Finally Udo had found the best way forward and in the process become a digital imaging expert. Years on and Udo is available to help other businesses and individuals experiencing these same problems and so his Colour Management Service is available to you.

Expert imaging and colour management will not just reduce costs, but also give you a much higher degree of control over the digital images you produce.

Already in the year 2000 I, Udo was happy to claim that in many cases, such as resolution, colour rendering, colour control and colour and image manipulation, digital definitely outperforms traditional photography.  Now during the last few years, things have changed dramatically:  Even with a digital camera costing £500 we are able to make stunning images which are easily enlarged up to A2 size prints.

My selected experience in Digital Colour Management:

1.  Profiling desktop printers using the standard drivers particularly Epson. (RGB profiling)

2. Testing and configuring various Rip drivers:

                               Colorbyte Image print
                               Shiraz
                               Ergosoft Posterprint  (including Hexachrome)
                               ProofMaster
                               Colorburst
                               Onyx

3.   Experience with Mutoh + Posterprint Rip and Hexachrome profiling.
4.   Tested both the original OEM inks and third party inks with a lot of different paper combinations.