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

[James Handsfield]

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.
> 
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