ICC profiles and the D60

[aneilson]

Ive been using my D60 for a few months now, and Photoshop 6 and 7. A few weeks ago I purchased an Epson 1290. What followed was weeks of sole searching and surfing to come up with an acceptable color workflow ( after a lot of learning).

I suppose I am now reasonably happy with the prints I see from the screen but not in all cases. ( Greatly helped after downloading the ICC profiles for the various epson papers which are NOT included on the UK installation disc!).

Some questions for the group.

Can I get a custom color space for the D60 free somewhere ie Adobe RGB. Ive seen some for sale. I also cant believe that Canon shipped such a high spec camera without a formal color space! (or am I missing something)

I have manually set up my AOC LCD screen to the best of my abilities using various gamma utilities, but continue to read that the best thing I could ever do is invest a few hundred pounds on a clip on calibrator. Is this really needed? has anybody here seen a jaw dropping difference from utilising one these devices. Is this the final step in really closing the gap between the 'what I see is what I get? I just cant believe my monitor is really the source of the discrepancies I some times see.

I have even taken time to setup photoshop proofing profiles which do, I admit reduce the color range differences between the screen and the printer output .

any thoughts?

[aneilson]

I see lots of people reading this post , but nobody answering. Is it too easy, too hard ?, or is everybody just plain disinterested.

I feel this the most important aspect of a camera workflow.

[henkbos]

OK, my thoughts about this subjet. Bought my D60 2 months ago after playing with an S10 for 2 years. I'm convinced that I can write my dissertation on digital photography; it's getting more and more a science to the annoyance of the rest of the family.
Still struggling with the software. Running Adobe 6 with some of Fred's actions. That part is getting better, especially now I use the profile for the D60. Still not convined what is better, which method of RAW-conversion, colour corretion, etc. Sometimes I'm thinking what's wrong with straight JPEG, point, shoot, print? But then again I didn't spend thousands on a camera, hundreds on tripods and toold to have it wasted by my lazyness. Someday, after I have taught myself NOT to browse on the net and reading everything, I WILL have a proper workflow and a more than good quality pics.
Does this help you? Probably not, but it indicates that it is hard and there are more struggling with the same problems.

[seacap]

The D60 uses the color space sRGB. If I need very critical color, this is what I do. Take a white sheet of paper. Photograph it so it fills your frame with the same light illuminating it as your subject. I underexpose mine by about a stop so it is a little gray and out of focus. Then use this for your Custom white balance. Depending on what your workflow is in the computer, you will eventually "assign" sRGB to the image, then "convert" it to Adobe RGB or what ever working color space you use. This should be done in 16bit mode for highest quality. I hope this answers some of your questions.

[kd6lor]

I have to agree with seacap, the most critical factor is white balance.

Using sRGB or RGB is not likely to yield a huge difference in color in the end result. I like to do color corrections in 16 bit if critical because when you change the color information, the extra bits of precision give you much more to work with.

I too am irritated that no color space is provided for the D60. Assuming the normal output is indeed sRGB, I guess you wouldn't need one for that, but what about the linear conversion of RAW files? Why wouldn't Canon provide a color space for that? Not sure...

I have been experimenting with Fred Miranda's linear conversion routine for Photoshop and have been having a lot of fun, but have not printed enough to determine how much I like the profile included with it.


Paul

[aneilson]

thanks for the comments

, I had looked at the miranda web site and thought about the linear correction action, but i havent pulled it down. Just as an aside. Im onto my second D60 the first had a group of blue pixels in the viewfinder and it was exchanged. Over the past weeks I have noticed the same error on this model only it looks to be only one pixel so I may just leave it. I can only assume it as a drop off in Canon QA to get as many as it can out to the market.

[JockMacMad]

Rather than using white paper and stopping down you can get a Kodak Grey Card.

This card is exactly middle grey ..

So if you follow seacap's advice and 'Photograph it so it fills your frame with the same light illuminating it as your subject' you should get it spot on.

No need to stop down.

That's the theory at least.

[macondo]

If the white balance is considered so critical to color rendering , then why are people using a grey card or an underexposed white card to set the White Balance?

Can anyone offer a really logical explanation to this?

Thanks.

[miro]

Different light sources have different temperatures, so what looks white in the sunlight, might not be so under, say, flourescent lighting. What camera really needs to know is what is actually white to be able to modify the colors of the taken snapshot. By setting custom white balance you tell the camera that white (or gray) parts of the photo must have egual amounts of red, green and blue components. That's why it doesn't matter if you take the picture of the correctly (more or less) exposed grey card (let's saf red=128, green=128 and blue=128 ), or underexposed white card (let's say red=200, green=200, blue=200), as long as components are equal it will look grey (or white).

I hope I didn't complicate this too much :)

Cheers

[aneilson]

Thanks all

Got a grey card and set it up , took some amazing window portraits which I printed on epson archival matte paper, colors were perfect. A mile better then velvia at 8 by 10 in my eyes. Why trust anybody to develop your own??

Andy

[macondo]

Thanks again , but I want more. Can you still make it more complicated , this is, more detailed? If this is bothering the rest of the crowd in the forum please e-mail me to photography@cantv.net.

Thanks one more time.

[aneilson]

macondo

go to
www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/dig-exp.shtml

and read the tutorial its called Digital Cameras
Setting Correct Exposure & White Balance by grant tiddy


Ive pasted the text here to let you read it the actual site has the pics .

By setting correct exposure & white balance when you do your shooting it can dramatically reduce the time needed to adjust your images in Photoshop afterwards, therefore increasing productivity & providing a more predictable result.

I found in the early days of ownership of my Canon D30 that a lot of my shooting was sometimes described as “estimated best guess” when it came to exposure & white balance. Sometimes I wasn't’t quite confident that I had got the shot quite right, so I would take a lot of extra exposures, bracketing the exposure just to be sure. Unfortunately in some cases it meant that I would spend hours in Photoshop fine tuning images to get a result exactly the way I wanted them to appear. Since most of my work is portrait work I also had terrible trouble getting accurate skin tones, and this was mainly due to inaccurate white balance. The Canon AWB (Auto White Balance) setting was not good enough for my type of work. Another problem arises as cameras in-built light meters measure reflected light, it can very easily get tricked depending on whether or not you are photographing dark or light subject matter.

Over a period of time I have developed the following simple technique which can significantly reduce the time spent tweaking the images in Photoshop, because you have a better image to start with. Whilst this process may be a bit awkward to start off with, like anything new, with practice these simple setup adjustments can be done in 1-2 minutes. Well worthwhile as this can save you hours of computer time later on.

To do this you will need:

Kodak Gray Card (gray on one side, white on the other)

Handheld incident light meter (optional but best to use one — see text later on)

Digital camera with histogram display & custom white balance functions (e.g. EOS-D30, D60, 1D)


The sample images provided here were shot on an EOS-1D of a family group in our studio and were illuminated by electronic flash heads. The same principal applies whether you are using natural light or studio flash equipment.



Step 1 — Measure Initial Starting Exposure

After setting up your required image composition take an incident light reading with your light meter in front of the middle of your subject with the white dome pointing back to where you will be taking the picture from. With your camera in Manual mode, set you camera to the same shutter speed & aperture readings displayed by the light meter. Be careful also that the ISO on your camera is the same as your light meter (in my case ISO 200).



Step 2 — Set White Balance

With your camera's exposure set to match your light meter (in my case 125sec @ f/10) get your subject to hold the Gray card with the WHITE side facing the camera. Take a photo, making sure the central spot in the viewfinder is fully covered by the white area as seen below. Note that your camera's AF system will have trouble focusing on the white card, so focus on your subjects finger or edge of the card, and without taking your finger off the shutter button recompose your shot before completing the exposure by fully depressing the shutter button.

Select this shot as the white balance image to be used & make sure your camera is set to custom white balance (for full details on this it is best to read the Canon instruction manual). A note for users of the EOS-1D I have found colour matrix 2 the best for portraits.

Make sure the histogram info display on the camera is enabled (see Canon instruction manual).

You should get something close to the image below on the display panel on the back of the camera.



Please note that I have found that correct white balance is particularly critical when shooting portraits, because of the subtle skin tone variations of the subject. If not spot-on will easily show with odd colour casts.



Step 3 — Fine Tune Exposure

Ask your subject to flip the Gray card over so that this time the GRAY side is facing the camera. Take another photo of the card but this time it is VERY IMPORTANT to make sure the Gray card fully covers the viewfinder. You should get something close to the image below. Your cameras AF will have the same trouble as mentioned before trying to focus on the Gray card so handle this in the same way.



Now this part is critical for you to understand. A Gray card is meant to measure the mid-tone of the image, so if everything has been set correctly the histogram peak should also be in the middle as well. But you can clearly see from the above image that in my case it is to the left of centre, so we will need to adjust the exposure on the camera.

Since I have found these vertical division lines to be roughly one f-stop apart, I increased the exposure by 2/3 of a f-stop (in my case 125sec @ f/8) and then re-shot the Gray card with the revised exposure. This was what resulted.



OK the histogram peak is right in the middle — I now have accurate exposure & white balance both set. Please note that if I had just relied on my incident light meter to give me my final reading, then in this case I would have been almost 1 f-stop out in my shooting, therefore not capturing the full tonal range in my digital files.



Step 4 — Start Shooting

You now have it. Start shooting without changing your exposure — your histogram should give you a good spread from left to right (dark to light tones). Providing your lighting does not change there is no need to change your exposure and no need to bracket exposure either.



Below is a final image straight off the camera before any adjustments were made. Not much to be done here at all.



Whilst this example applies to a portrait shoot in a studio it can easily be applied to outdoor shooting of people with natural light or with some allowances for shooting just about anything. I have used the exact same procedure for photographing small table-top commercial product shots also giving excellent results.

I mentioned earlier that the handheld incident light meter is optional. All this does is provide you with a more accurate starting exposure to begin with. I suppose in a way it is also a double check when used with your Gray card. You can ‘best guess’ the exposure to start with and then by using the Gray card fine tune the exposure. The only other thing is — by occasionally checking the exposure with your light meter it will easily tell you if the level of light has changed from taking your initial measurements. This is particularly useful if your photos are outside with variable lighting conditions and/or shooting over a long period of time. Just remember the variation in settings between your light meter and camera when you were initially fine-tuning your exposure.

This technique will provide you with photos which are a lot closer to the mark than what you had to start with before, and reduces Photoshop computer adjustment time. One other benefit is if you have made adjustments to one image in Photoshop using certain settings then in most cases you can use those exact same adjustment settings to other images shot during the same shoot – ie: you do not have to correct each individual image.

It seems in this modern digital age of photography that the old Gray card is not dead yet and is indeed a very useful tool.

I hope this article will help others who were suffering from the same problems that I was. If you find this info helpful please let me know by email. If you also have any special tricks of your own I would also like you to drop me an email.

Here’s To More Shooting & Less Time Wasting.



It worked for me with my D60

thanks to luminous for the cut and paste, im sure they wont mind the copyright enfringement as it will pull more bodies to the site.

Andy

[macondo]

Well Andy and fellows. Thanks a BIG million!!!.

If you want to have an idea of how useful this info is to me, just think that I will start shooting repro work for no less than 100 paintings, starting tomorrow.

I can set the whole thing very easily and run the whole show with abosulte control. Many many thanks again!!.
Now, there are a couple of interesting observations that can come out of this info from the luminous website:

First , it is now clearly a misunderstanding and a wrong practice to use a Grey card to stablish a White balance, as I originally asked in my first post. We are talking of different things, and grey measurements apply to correct exposure values, and even to stablish a comparison between camera readings and an external exposure meter, whereas WHite balnce will define the overall color balance of each shot.

My own tests had already shown that my D60 is is perfect synchro with both meters I have, the Minolta and the Sekonic, both for incident and reflected light, although sharp precision came out of reflected readings from the Sekonic.

Second, the exposure compensation by checking the histogram of the grey card shot in the camera info, only confirms what many have already seen in their cameras, related to underexposure in the D60( and in some D30). THis can be thought of more like a meter adjusted to expose for slide film,( because my meters showed the same readings than the camera all the time) , and if I want really saturated colors, that is the way to go. However, we can then think that we overexpose close to one full stop in the D60, and it will look like we are actually shooting and exposing Negative film, which in theory makes more sense if we are shooting digital negatives.

I am sure that 3 or 4 different lighting scenarios will suffice for each of us to confirm if the beahaviour of our own camera follows the same pattern all over the place. If this is so, then we can just set our +1 stop overexposure adjustment as an average setting for correct exposure values in average situations,without further testing, except when we want deliberate color saturation on camera.

Third, and very useful, the histogram for the grey card can easily show wether we are using a REAL NEUTRAL GREY card or if the one we have has some contaminating color, since the "shape" of a neutral card has to be as definitely sharp as the one in the example. Mine for instance, is not adequate( the histogram has a tail, indicating some color hue affecting my readings) and I have to run and buy a good one, which I will verify on site, with my camera, before buying it. Highly reccomended procedure.

THis is useful if we are going to open the grey card image in photoshop in order to load it and save it as a curve to apply to an image or group of images.THe hue will show up in all images the curve is loaded in.

THis is it for the moment. THanks again, and if I find something useful from this coming experiece, I will let you know.

Happy sunday!!!

[wcapald]

Why don't you check out www.expodisc.com It allows easy setting of white balance and you can use the disc for accurate incident exposure readings all in one fell swoop!