Mac calibration at 1,8 or 2,2 ?

[kelly_flanigan1]

There are some customers Mac and PC that never calibrate when they create their masterpiece for a printer. Thus one ladys.work has super dark purple text on a black background. It it looks great on her monitor at 2am with the brightness on super high and all the room lights off; working in Vampire mode for a rush sales poster for the next day as our input. The image when sent to a printer looks poor; the text is almost lost in the black background. NO amount of mentioning about calibration will convince them of issues with being off base; since they "use a Mac; or XYZ PC". Thus sadly what we printers sometimes have to do is throw in a curve for customer X, another for customer Y; to make the poster they need for the weekend grand sale readable. A poor mixture of uncalibrated monitors, poor color choices; poor ill fonts; poor text size is often not so uncommon as an input. The whole world doesnt have calibrated monitors; and never will. If you create images and text for a website or printer an unclibrated monitor adds another layer of error.

[digitaldog]

>Thus sadly what we printers sometimes have to do is throw in a curve for customer X, another for customer Y; to make

the poster they need for the weekend grand sale readable.

 

This is IMHO a big mistake we see in the photo lab space that just doesn't happen in the print (ink on paper, press)

space. In that space, the numbers you provide go out to the device and you get what you get OR you first look at a proof

and if it sucks, you pay for the numbers to be changed and, another proof is pulled. When the customer gets what they

get, and it sucks because their files stink or they don't have proper color management, or they don't even pay for a pre-

proof, they either fix the issue on their end or have someone knowingly fix the issue. People in press work would never

consider fixing anything without a fee or print anything without a proof offered at a price. There's no behind the scenes

file alteration. The photo centric workflow is simply a state of denial. The customer didn't ask for a fix, probably didn't

know a fix was made and doesn't know that what they see in print doesn't have any relationship with the document they

sent to the lab. So this sorry state of a workflow just continues.

 

Yes I understand that customers would be upset by the output they get from their own supplied, awful RGB numbers and

don't understand color management. And I understand the toothpaste is out of the tube here, the photo centric labs didn't

get this defined from the beginning (or they did really dumb things like send out some digital file and a print and asked

their customers to tweak their displays to match the print, an exercise in futility). So this issue will continue forever with

these labs and customers until one group figures out the folly of this so called workflow.

 

Going back to the old days and photo labs, no lab worth it's salt would just assume to push or pull film processing

without a snip test (the proof). And they communicated with the customer about this process. To think any pro lab would

behind the scenes decide how to process the film without the customer in the loop is unthinkable. But if a photographers

sends an RGB document to a lab, the lab feels it can open, interpreted and alter the document without discussion to the

client? Seems a dangerous idea to me.

[pgwerner]

I have a Mac and I use 2.2, but then I have a Sony monitor rather than an Apple one.

 

On the other hand, I'm never quite sure what to tell somebody with a newer Apple LCD (standalone or part of an iMac). In

some places I read they still use 1.8 as their native gamma, in others I hear they abandoned that standard a long time ago.

[Carl Stone]

"I have a Mac and I use 2.2, but then I have a Sony monitor rather than an Apple one.

 

On the other hand, I'm never quite sure what to tell somebody with a newer Apple LCD (standalone or part of an iMac). In

some places I read they still use 1.8 as their native gamma, in others I hear they abandoned that standard a long time

ago."

 

Well, the official Apple position now is to set the gamma at 2.2.