Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2019/12/13

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Subject: [Leica] colors, screens, iMacs, laptops, and such
From: jhandsfield at att.net (James Handsfield)
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 08:19:23 -0500
References: <91bb9b4db05ee5c0eda528e4a975b21b@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> <E9969C76-B613-47BA-AE9E-267F2BABDA1D@att.net>

I should have mentioned that I do all photo processing using the LG monitor.

> On Dec 13, 2019, at 8:18 AM, James Handsfield <jhandsfield at att.net> 
> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for this, Brian.
> 
> I use two monitors - the one on my iMac and an LG Ultrawide monitor.  The 
> LG comes calibrated, but I still calibrate both monitors using the same 
> system you do.  
> 
> For the best prints, I use ImagePrint BLACK from Colorbyte Software, which 
> totally overrides the printers profiles, using it?s own which is based on 
> the printer AND the paper profiles.  These also compensate for the 
> expected display lighting.  The BLACK version works only with Canon and 
> Epson printers.  ImagePrint RED is available to work with all printers, 
> but it uses the printer?s profiles.  
> 
> Jim Handsfield
> 
>> On Dec 12, 2019, at 7:52 PM, Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> I have never seen any computer display costing less than $1500 (just for 
>> the display) that came from the manufacturer with anything close to 
>> proper color calibration.
>> 
>> I have never seen any laptop from any manufacturer whose color rendition 
>> is good enough that I would use it for serious editing of color 
>> photographs or producing color-calibrated InDesign files for printing. 
>> The display hardware used in laptops is just not good enough. Maybe 
>> someday Eizo will make a laptop, but today they don't.
>> 
>> I have done a lot of critical color work in my life, including making 
>> museum-grade prints (of other people's pictures), making 10-foot by 
>> 20-foot color prints for trade shows, producing corporate annual reports 
>> for a large cosmetics company, restoring faded prints of historically 
>> important images, and taking pictures of my family. If you want the image 
>> that you see on your screen to look the same on someone else's screen, or 
>> look the same when printed on paper, then all of the devices involved 
>> need to be color calibrated. Service bureaus owning machines that can 
>> make 10-foot by 20-foot prints want print files with managed color.
>> 
>> This article in Photography Life, about 4 or 5 years old, is the best 
>> introduction I know of to the issue:
>> 
>> https://photographylife.com/the-basics-of-monitor-calibration
>> 
>> and, unlike most things you see online, its comment section is mostly 
>> worth reading.
>> 
>> 
>> This iMac-specific article from mid-2018 goes into specific detail about 
>> calibrating iMacs:
>> https://photographylife.com/how-to-calibrate-imac-and-imac-pro-displays
>> 
>> I am typing this email on an iMac Retina 5K (known in Apple documentation 
>> as "iMac18,3") that I have calibrated with the i1Display Pro device using 
>> the software recommended by that author. I don't reverify the calibration 
>> often enough, but I know I should. I also know I should floss my teeth 
>> twice a day.
>> 
>> There are certain people on the LUG whose online pictures always look off 
>> to me. Off-color, off-contrast, off-gamma, whatever. I don't take this as 
>> evidence that they are bad photographers, I take this as evidence that 
>> they used an uncalibrated monitor to fine-tune their images, and that 
>> what they saw on their screen is not what I'm seeing on mine. If I could 
>> adjust my iMac so that its display matched the display of photographer X, 
>> I suspect that what I saw would look better. But I can't do that. The 
>> only choices are to live with wrong colors or to get everybody to use 
>> calibrated displays and managed colors.
>> 
>> Even black and white images are vulnerable to mis-calibration distortion. 
>> The luminosity transfer function (which determines the shade of gray 
>> displayed for a given luminosity value in the image file) can be all over 
>> the map. Sometimes I see a monochrome image on the LUG that I like so 
>> much that I try to reconstruct the profile that the photographer must 
>> have been using so that I can see the same shades of gray the 
>> photographer does. It's too complex to try to do that with color images.
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Leica Users Group.
>> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> 



In reply to: Message from reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid) ([Leica] colors, screens, iMacs, laptops, and such)
Message from jhandsfield at att.net (James Handsfield) ([Leica] colors, screens, iMacs, laptops, and such)