[Leica] colors, screens, iMacs, laptops, and such

[lluisripollphotography at gmail.com (Lluis Ripoll)]

Thank you Brian for this article about calibrating the iMac, I have as well 
a iMac 5K Retina, I work quite well with it for B&W but for color I always 
have serious problems, I don?t have X-Rite, I use Datacolor Spyder 4 Pro but 
I?ve never been happy with printing my color work, I like as it looks on my 
monitor but printed is not the same. However I?m not too much concerned for 
this, as you know my work is 99,99% in B&W and I use the color only for the 
family prints, on the other hand, right now I?m working in my darkroom, I 
don?t print any more with my Epson SC P600 and my main concern is do the 
better I can Silver Gelatin prints, last months I?m using the amazing method 
of Split Grading, and I?m very happy with the prints.

Cheers
Lluis


> El 13 des 2019, a les 1:52, Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> va 
> escriure:
> 
> 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.
> 
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