Monitor calibration... Do I need profiles?

I want to calibrate my monitor. If I set my white point to 6500 K and

I install the profiles, what else do I have to do to get it finished?

What about brightness. Is it easy to switch my profiles for different

medias I choose? Instead of profiling, can I make a print and then

match it? Thanks for the help.

I won't go into the details of creating profiles here, but I would like to clarify one thing. Your digital darkroom consists of a number of color devices, such as a digital camera, scanner, monitor, and printer. You need to calibrate (the act of making a change to the behaviour of a device, e.g., the brightness of your monitor) and profile (create a "description" for the color response) of each independent item. Monitors are independent from printers, so they need individual profiles. After all, you can edit on monitor, and print to any printer that is calibrated and profiled.

 

Things become more complicated when external factors come into play. For example, inkjet printers require paper and ink. The color response (i.e., printed output) depends on the particular ink and paper, so describing the printing subsystem with a single profile means having to create a different profile for every combination of the three.

 

If you profile both your monitor and printer using your ad hoc method, you will at best be able to get acceptable results with a particular paper and ink on your printer. You will not be able to submit files to a lab, because you are not calibrated to the standard. It is very much like synchronizing watches. Your monitor and printer may be set to the same time, but is it the right time?

Yes you have to calibrate and profile your monitor using a colorimeter and the

necessary software. There is literally no other way to make sure that what yu

are are seeing is indeed a true representation of the information in a digital

image file. Anyone who tells you otherwise simplydoesn't know what they are

talking about.

Just to clarify, I plan to print with a digital minilab or a lightjet, not an inkjet.

Then fuhgedaboutit; get a colorimeter.

That doesn't make any difference. Unless you want to take the serious risk of becoming an impoverished babbling idiot and a danger to themselves and others, you still need to get your monitor showing something close enough (for your purposes) to what gets printed.

Hello all, I am stretching this thread a bit, but I was just looking for the Adobe Gamma monitor calibration and can't locate it on my computer. I am using Windows and Photoshop 7. Does anyone know where the Adobe Gamma resides?

Thanks,

Bill

On Windoze XP machines with PS7, it's on the Control Panel.

It's the same place for Windows 2000 also.

I just profiled my monitor to the type of paper I use. I got the profiles from popularphotography.com Do I still need to get one of those spider things. How does the profile know my monitor settings?

Justin,<P>Those are profiles for </B> your printer</B>. <U><I>not your

monitor.</U></I><P>There are three different parts of the digital imagining

process.<P>

--The camera and or scanner.<P>

--The monitor<P>

--The printer.<P>

While it is extremely helpful to have the input and out devices profiled, It is

much more important to have a profiled monitor. if you only use the printer

profiles with out an an accurate (which means profiled and calibrated) monitor

you stand a very high chance of not being able to "soft proof" your results

before you waste time and money on prints. <P>What is "soft proofing".

simply it is being able to see on your monitor, an accurate picture of what your

print will look like. The only way to get that accurate preview is to have a

monitor that is true to to the information.

<i>I just profiled my monitor to the type of paper I use. I got the profiles from popularphotography.com Do I still need to get one of those spider things. How does the profile know my monitor settings?</i><p>

I take it you reverse engineered the profile (adjusted monitor to prints). As I said before, this is not a good way to go, because your monitor's colors are not correct. The moment you change your lab (or they use a different paper, for example), you will have to adjust your monitor again. This is a fruitless exercise; just calibrate it properly!

<p>

The brightness and contrast of your monitor should be set such that you can distinguish detail in both the shadows and the highlights. A colorimeter with profiling software will help you find the optimal settings.

Justin,

One more thing. You definitely should not use a printer profile for your monitor

profile. There is no connection.<P>

You profile the monitor and use the profile in Photoshop to adjust what you

see on screen to accurately reflect the data. You then use the printer profile,

also in Photoshop (or other ICC compliant digtal darkroom software), t o tell

the software what the output will look like via a soft proof.

You are getting good information here. When they tell you that you should calibrate your monitor, they are correct. It's easy enough to do with a product similar to ColorBlind Prove It! (the one I'm most familiar with).

 

The whole point of this calibration thing is WYSIWYG. To do this, everything in the chain has to agree on what black is, white, red, green, blue. The end result is that you should be able to look at an image on your monitor, and a print tacked up on your wall, and they should be identical. No color variation. No dynamic range variation.

 

If you are doing work this critically, you need to have color corrected lights in your work room. Typically in graphics arts, the unifying color temperature is 5000K, and low and behold you can buy 5000K florescent tubes. Install some 5000K tubes, turn off your incandescents and pull the blinds. Then the image on your monitor (calibrated to 5000K) and the print on the wall (in 5000K light) should look the same.

 

If you aren't doing your own printing, you should talk to you printer about calibration. You want everything in sync. including your room lights. This is pretty routine stuff, but it doesn't just happen. You have to do some work, and you are heading in the right direction by wanting to calibrate your monitor. It's just that it doesn't stop there.

Once again, I would like to clarify. When I say the profile for the paper I mean the kind my digital minilab uses. I believe this is for the monitor. If I get a spider what does it calibrate it to? Does it compare with something and does the profile the spider creates need to be embedded in my tiff files. Thanks all for the help.

You misunderstand; the profile the lab gave you describes their printer and paper combination. You still have to calibrate your monitor. As I said before, calibration is something that has to be done for every unit, to create a unique profile. In this light, it is clear that your lab can not give you your monitor's profile. Likewise, you can't go to someone and buy your monitor's profile. You have to create it yourself, bearing in mind the working conditions (ambient light and temperature). How do you create it? That's what the colorimeter (puck, spyder) is for.

<p>

So just what do you do with the profile your lab offered? After doing your editing, convert from your working space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, Bruce RGB, etc.) to the space of the lab's printer. If you use Photoshop, this means going to Image>Mode>Convert to profile. <a href="http://pictopia.com/perl/tech_guide#ColorMatch">Here's an explanation</a> from the web site of a ICC managed Lightjet lab.

Sorry for the confusion Justin. You don't profile a monitor, you calibrate it. That is, you physically change the way it displays. When you look at an area of your image with Photoshop, and query photoshop with the eyedropper tool and the tool tells you that the image color is 255,255,255, your monitor has to show you white. Not a pink white, or a blue white, but white. The puck reads the color from the screen and tells either the monitor or the driver for the video card how to correct the display so that 255,255,255 from photoshop displays white. (It does this for other colors too, white is just an example.)

 

Profiles are for printers, and for print media. They tell the printer how to print that 255,255,255 as white, and not pink white or blue white.

 

 

 

It's not an either/or. It's both.

I forgot to add that what Emre says about how to use a profile is correct.

Hogarth you were right when you said emre was right, but wrong whe nyou

saidthatyou don't profile a monitor. Actually you do,<P>The way the colorimer

AKA "puc' or "spyder") and profiling software is this:

-- the software generates a fixed standard of color sequences which are

displayed on your monitor. as with all things digitl this information is in the

form of strings of numbers.

The colorimeter/puck/spyder sits on the face ofthe monitor and reads the color

patches , translating those displayed colors back into numbers which the

software then compares to the original numbers it generated. It amkes note

ofthe differences between the two sets of numbers and creates a "profile' set

of equations to tell the video processing image in your computer /imaging

software combo how to adjust the colorsgoing to your monitor so the

displayed colors match the original 'raw' set of numbers generated by the

profiling software.<P>You then assign the profile a name and save it in

Photoshop.<P>As for your minilab's profile numbers, Follow Emre's

directions.

To add a bit to Ellis's clarification - the puck/spider does, indeed, do a color calibration. That calibration is then used to generate a profile, which is a translation table providing the monitor with refined details on how to display each input RGB triad.

Justin, The answers to your questions are on my page on monitor/printer calibration, <A HREF="http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html">http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html</A>.