Display Profile for Viewing Web Images?

I have a quick question about viewing images on the web to get the best color accuracy. I have an EIZO CS2730. When calibrating it, there are 3 profiles that it builds: Photography, Web Design, and Printing. Among other differences, the Printing white point is set at 5000 K, Photography at 5500 K and Web Design at 6500 K - brightness is set at 100 cd/m^2 for Photography and 80 cd/m^2 for the other two.

Normally, I am working with the Photography profile enabled. But I was just shopping for fountain pen ink online, and some sites show swatches of all the colors by a single brand, so you can compare the colors. It struck me that perhaps the Photography profile is not best for viewing these images to judge the color of the ink. That perhaps the Web Design, with the bluer white point would give me a more accurate idea of the color of the ink.

What do you guys think? Anyone else have experience shopping for inks and selecting their display's profile, or for paints, etc.?

Thanks.

The problem with this sort of thing, while working across the internet is as much on the production end as it is on the viewing end. If the production end hasn't had really good colour management all the way through, it won't matter how good your viewing conditions will be. Then you run into the problem of matching the viewing conditions that you will use to compare the ink under, to the viewing conditions for the screen. As far as I understand the situation you want the white point of the monitor to match the lighting under which you are viewing the monitor. You will also need to have a viewing booth again with matching illumination to view the ink when you go to compare it with the online images.

Ideally you will want to have a monitor calibration device that is able to measure the ambient light in your viewing area as part of the calibration process. This should then give you both the correct colours, and the correct white point for the location of your monitor. If you then view the ink as used on paper you should see the best possible match, assuming that the upstream to you end was also correctly colour managed.

Alan

Alan gave you good advice, a calibration device will give you accurate colors. I use my XRite calibrator every 30 days to ensure that I stay consistent. I cannot imagine what my images would look like if I didn’t do so. I certainly would not shoot for clients if I were just eyeballing it.

Thanks for the replies. Alan, yeah, those are all certainly issues. I'm about a third of the way through Real World Color Management by Fraser, Murphy and Bunting. I'm still coming up to speed on color management for the work I produce myself, but I'm generally aware of the issues you bring up. There is no guarantee that the sites have even though of color management let alone done it well, actually the likelihood is almost certain they have not.

I am just curious if there are generally accepted display profile setting changes for viewing online images when researching products that are highly color dependent. Like if anyone has found that they need to switch out of their normal working photography profile and go with a different white point because they found those changes gave them a better feel for the inks, paints, or whatever they were buying (without being able to see them in person).

Fortunately, a lot of the stores sell ink samples. It's great for them because the price per mL is so much higher. It does allow me to pick up a bunch of samples and try them before buying a full bottle, but it really isn't as cost effective as it might seem initially.

Web servers don't do colour management, that is actually down to the person providing the images. Hopefully they will have used sRGB, and included the profile information in the file. If they do use anything else you better hope that they included the profile, and of course you need to be using a colour managed browser, I think that covers most of the current suspects.

As long as your monitor is correctly profiled that should ensure that you see the correct colours based on the translation from the file profile to your display profile. That is the whole point of doing colour management after all.

Alan