Yet More Questions: Monitor Calibration

[Spinners]

I have a few monitor calibration questions:

first of all i noticed my 10D has a setting for adobe color and SRGB. I also noticed that my Dell monitor has a setting for SRGB.

should i set my camera to SRGB, and my monitor to SRGB, and then photoshop to use SRGB?

Why does my monitor not allow me to adjust my contrast and brightness when using SRGB? how does the monitor know what is correct?

My camera is using whatever the default is right now.

i currently have my monitor calibrated using the adobe gamma wizard in the control panel. I set my color balance to 9300 because thats what my monitor is using. I had to turn up my contrast all the way up and adjust my brightness to make a square disapear (which is really impossible, must be a joke) Now that ive calibrated my monitor can a re-adjust them? or do they have to stay where they are..

Anyways, i notice that pics look brighter on my 10D than they do on the monitor, so i have been having to increase the brightness on my pics about 10% to get them to look good. The funny thing is, on my laptop the pictures looked perfect. This is really annoying.

How will i ever know what to expect from a printing lab?

Some help would be appreciated.

[Dans_D60]

Calibration from an external source is the only true way to calibrate your monitor. I use the Spyder from Colorvision and it works great: http://www.colorvision.com/home.html

Dan
http://www.pettusphoto.com

[lobo4200]

Spinners,
I know you like to learn by experience but you might have to bite the bullet on this one and do some reading. I spent lots of time before buying my 10D and continue to read about monitor and print calibration, color profiles, print permanance, etc... and still couldn't come close to easily answering your question without getting carpal tunel. The equipement you end up buying to complement your digital work flow will all depend on your tastes and what your needs are.
If you plan on having complete control over what your end print looks like you will need some type of calibration equipment. There are several ways to do this. Like Dans_D60 I bought the Colorvision SpyderPRO with OptiCal and PrintFIX. There is also much more expensive finite equipment than this but I don't think I'll be needing that for myself...especially at $1500 and up.
If you expect to get prints that resemble what you are looking at on your screen from a print shop you should check this site out
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/
On the lower left side of the front page check out "Fuji Frontier and Noritsu Printer Profiles". There is also a lot of information that may answer your question better.
Also check this link out about Adobe RGB and sRGB
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1019&message=4778608
And this is might help on how to do things manually...trial and error...
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1019&message=5375943
Best of luck and keep shooting!

[Spinners]

I appreciate your help.. i have been reading about it. But, i just dont understand how the pc knows what conversion to use when reading the image from the camera.

how does the printer know how to understand the monitor, and how in the heck is any profile going to relate to a professional lab printing machine.

i dont get it.. i understand profiles. but wouldnt every device have to use the same standard.. i cant exactly upload my monitors icc file to my camera. Nor does my icc profile match the mini labs profile..

could you clarify this a bit more?

[lobo4200]

This is currently my limited understanding...and hopefully someone can add to this or correct me if I'm wrong...
What we want is to eventually print what we are seeing on our monitor. To get the widest possible (and editable) color gamut you should shoot in RAW Adobe RGB though this may not be necessary or desirable to everyone. By calibrating your monitor you are setting it to what is pleasing to your eye (you are telling your monitor how you want to perceive what the camera has captured) and also it is a repeatable...meaning a week or month from now you can recalibrate your monitor to the same exact settings so that all work you do on your computer will start from the same reference point. This is particulary important to a group of people working on a the same project on multiple monitors as they can all be calibrated to the same color setting. Now to approximate (because it will never be exact) a print to look like what is on your monitor you need to assign your image a printer profile...which should translat what you are seeing to the printing device you are using. So if you want to go to Costco or Wal-Mart and get prints with some predictability you need their specific machine'e profile and it has to be specific to the paper you are going to print on. What Dry Creek Photo do is allow you to take a digital file to a photo lab and have them print off a 4x6 target (machine and paper specific). You then send the target back to Dry Creek and they will post the downloadable profile file on their web site. If you are doing all of your own printing (closed loop workflow) then you can get away with doing a lot of this manually without any sofware or harware through trial and error until you are producing your desired prints. Whatever you do on your computer is not going to look the same on onother computer's monitor. It might be close and it should still be pleasing but if the monitors were side by side you would easily see the difference...a perfect example is to walk into a Best Buy and look at the wall of tv sets...how many pictures look exactly the same?

Hope my attemp there helps. What I did was purchased "Mastering Digital Printing" by Harald Johnson which I believe was published at the end of 2002 so it farily up to date. There is a lot of unnecessary but interesting background information in this book and it helps give a wider understanding of how everything ties together as well as describe what is currently available for your digital workflow...ok...my fingers are tired now...gotta go.

[slejhamer]

spinners wrote:
i just dont understand how the pc knows what conversion to use when reading the image from the camera.

how does the printer know how to understand the monitor, and how in the heck is any profile going to relate to a professional lab printing machine.



Don't you love color management? (It's actually not as bad as it seems.)

Lobo's comments are accurate. So are Dan's - if you are really concerned about this, invest in a hardware calibration unit such as the Spyder.

Now for my 2 cents worth:

I think of the device (monitor, printer, etc.) profiles as little instruction booklets which tell the device how to read the file data. For example, your monitor profile, which you created with Adobe Gamma, could be telling your computer "whenever you are given a file with a medium gray pixel coded as R128-G128-B128, tell the video card that it is really R135-G128-B121 because that's what some guy said is the proper way for this particular monitor to display medium gray." Each device you use - camera, scanner, monitor, printer - needs its own instruction booklet.

A problem arises because each of the booklets is written in a different language! The solution: get an interpreter. This is where device-independent profiles come into play: sRGB, AdobeRGB, BruceRGB, etc. The embedded interpreter travels along with the image file. When you open the file in an application that supports color management, the interpreter might say "Good day. Here is an image file by which I am employed as interpreter. As a courtesy, I will interpret for you the color in this pixel over here as medium gray, R128-G128-B128. Now go and tell the operating system to make whatever adjustments are necessary so that the monitor will display this image properly." In a closed loop system, where you have a properly calibrated monitor and you only view your images within Photoshop and you only print them on a calibrated printer for which you have profiles, the system works quite well.

But many applications will not listen to the interpreters! Your web browser, for instance, ignores the AdobeRGB interpreter and assumes the image is in your monitor colorspace, which is a narrower gamut than AdobeRGB. That's why AdobeRGB images will look undersaturated and cold in your web browser.

(If you convert your AdobeRGB images to your monitor profile, however, they should display correctly. However, they may not appear correctly on anyone else's monitor. That is why you would convert to sRGB for web display - think of it as the lowest common denominator, which should look reasonably close on the average uncalibrated monitor, though it will never really be "right" on anyone's monitor, including your own.)

Your printer, similarly, only knows how to read the colors as you intend them if you tell it to do so - and you can do this by converting to your printer's or mini lab's profile (thereby embedding an interpreter that the specific output device will be able to understand.) Ideally you would have a profile not only for the printer but also for the specific print media (ink and paper) as well.

This thread may be of additional help:

http://www.photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=12086#60379

One caveat: This all may be technically incorrect! If so, I'd appreciate any corrections.

Cheers,

[Clavain]

Thanks for all the info.

Lots to read and understand.

I have a Eizo Flexscan L675 and was thinking of getting the Spyder from Colorvision, (since everybody seems to be saying that you have to have it) to calibrate my display but I am a bit hesitant at spending the money. Will buying the spyder really help?

Clavain

[Clavain]

Thanks for all the info.

Lots to read and understand.

I have a Eizo Flexscan L675 and was thinking of getting the Spyder from Colorvision, (since everybody seems to be saying that you have to have it) to calibrate my display but I am a bit hesitant at spending the money. Will buying the spyder really help?

Clavain

[slejhamer]

Clavain wrote:
Will buying the spyder really help?


Depends on your needs, the age of your monitor, and other factors. Some people are quite satisfied with Adobe Gamma. But for me, it wasn't until I got a Spyder and Photocal software that my lab prints came back looking almost exactly the way I saw them on screen. Also, the monitor will shift over time and you need to recalibrate periodically; having the hardware ensures consistency.

Best of luck,

[Spinners]

The funny thing about all this is that i am a computer geek, i mean, i can run a large network, program routers, switches, and databases, but this simple color crap has me all confused. LOL cruel world..

anyway, so continue on.. I found a ICC file for a wal-mart photo lab near me. now, some simply explain what this profile will do for me.

will it make my screen match the print out of the printer at wal-mart?

will it make my printer print like the wal-mart printer even though the screen looks different?

I just am not making the connection here. (isnt it obvious)

When i calibrated my monitor with Adobe Gamma, it asked me to turn up my contrast and then adjust my brightness and so on.. Is this calibrating it? if so to what standard? it saves an ICC file.. but whats that file really doing? and how is it different from choosing a color space? this is whats got me confused.

Sorry to drive you all nuts. I have been reading on it, but i dont get it.. im missing a connection.. i feel an "aha" moment coming on soon.

thanks

[lobo4200]

Depending on what printer you have, it should come with it's own print profiles. The profiles are printer, ink, and paper specific, so if you use a 3rd party paper or ink other than the OEM paper and ink which the profile was created for the profile will not reproduce what you see on your computer. This is where custom profiles come in to play.

Your Wal-Mart profile was created for a specific paper (gloss, matte, etc.) to be run on their printer with their ink used at that specific Wal-Mart. That profile will work on any printer but will not produce the same image.

Once you have calibrated your monitor and then worked on an image in Photoshop (or whatever your using) and are finally pleased with what you have...you then assign your Wal-Mart printer profile to the file and save it. I'm skipping a lot as far as sizing your image, checking for out of gamut colors, etc... You then copy that file to whatever form of memory transfer Wal-Mart works with (CD-R, compact flash, smart media) and take it to Wal-Mart to be printed. If you got your profile off of the Dry Creek web site there are very good directions on their site on how to use their profiles and what to tell the person at Wal-Mart to do with you file to achieve your desired result.

And your right...it sounds like a lot but it's much easier than it sounds...you will at some point say, ahh!

You know many people simply shoot a few digital frames and have them printed and are happy with the results. Some people go beyond that...just how far you want to go is up to you but there are limits. You have all this technology which changes every minute of the day and between your camera, monitor, printer, editing software, etc...you realize that they all work to serve their own purpose but are not yet up to co-existing in a plug and play world. There is still a lot of personal/manual work to be done. You have just replaced yourself with your film developer.

Once your doing a lot of editing/manipulation work and want even larger prints you will or may have already discovered the Photoshop plug in, General Fractals.

So, I'd advise going back to the Dry Creek web site and doing some more reading or give them a call. Read about how to use their profiles. Then create an image file with their profile and create another image file of the same image, same size and don't assign their profile to it and get them both printed at Wal-Mart...make sure to identify them some way. Take those back home and open the original file and look at both the images and compare them to what you see on your monitor.

The point is to come up with a work flow that is repeatable and gives you the output you are expecting.

I'm not knowledgable enough to answer your question about how monitor calibration works just that there is a color standard that rules gamut range and depth. There is also an illuminaiton standard, D50 (5000 degrees kelvin) though some people set their monitors at D65 (all right out of the "Mastering Digital Printing" book). My undertanding is that your editing software understands what you have calibrated your monitor to and is capable of making the translation to your printer profile. What a device like the Spyder does is give you the best relationship between red, green, and blue instead of you trying to adjust these manually.

PS www.dpreview.com has a very active forum on many on these same issues.