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

[jhandsfield at att.net (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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