Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

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chris_ma
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

cbphoto wrote:
Fri Jul 08, 2022 6:34 am
I recommend the book Real World Color Management: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting. These guys were at the vanguard of applied color science and have helped shaped the system we now use.
I can second that recommendation: it's a great book.
it's quite old now, but addresses the fundamental questions very well, and those haven't really changed.
It's also written in a very humorous way, which makes it fun to read.

chris
chris

cbphoto
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by cbphoto »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:56 pm
If this explanation prompts some more discussion or suggestions, that will be great too.
I don't know if this will help, but, there is an open source color management system that you might take a look at: https://www.argyllcms.com
~ CB

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by rjlittlefield »

chris_ma wrote:
Fri Jul 08, 2022 1:37 pm
Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else and it's likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather. You can make the situation better, though far from perfect, by carefully calibrating and stabilizing your equipment, your procedures, and your environment. This book discusses some tools and techniques that can help.
hi Rik,

while I can relate to some of the above and I suspect it was written tongue in cheek by the books author, I fundamentally disagree.
chris_ma, to clarify, what I wrote was that (boldface added)
rjlittlefield wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:56 pm
Roughly summarizing my impressions, what the book's introduction really ought to say is something like (quoted block follows)
I can say for sure that the phrasing in the "quoted" block was tongue in cheek, because those words were written by me, not by the author of the book.

Regarding the content, I don't see much disagreement in what's been written.

In fact, if I had written a long description, and avoided tongue-in-cheek style, I would have written something very much like what you did.

So, what's been written? When I read your words (previous page, HERE) what I see is that you've said monitors don't match prints, prints on different paper don't match each other, and the appearance of anything changes if you change the viewing environment. Then you've said that with sufficient investment in training, tools, and stabilizing the equipment and production environment, you can reliably control what gets produced, but once you release the product you have no assurance that what the viewer sees is what you intended them to. I also see that "with some experience and care, things can be matched to give the same impression. this is usually not possible by automated setting but has be done manually", and I totally agree with that.

Now, as a matter of style I grant that my wording "Color management is a mess" may be seen as too harsh. To be less caustic, while retaining a bit of tongue-in-cheek, I might have written "Color management is messy", in the same neutral-valued sense that many things are messy but controllable with some care. Or to go even farther toward graciousness, I might say that "color management is intrinsically complicated, and folks who are deeply immersed in the field are to be complimented for getting a good handle on the production process."

Still, we're all talking about the same set of facts, and I don't think we disagree about what those facts are.

Again to clarify, my comment about "likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather" was motivated by exactly the same point that you made: "if we work at a monitor in a bright room, and then continue to work at night in a dark room, the brightness, contrast and saturation will feel quite different because our eyes (and brain) are reacting to the environment."

To put this in a personal context, my own primary workspace is in a shared family room that has a large window, which my wife is adamant must be left uncovered during daylight hours. My normal workday spans from roughly 7:30 am to 11 pm (with copious breaks!), so during the span of a single day my monitors may be viewed in an environment that ranges from the blue of shade to the gray of clouds to a mix of cool & warm LED tubes.

I recognize that this is a wildly uncontrolled workspace. Most of my workspaces over the last 50 years have been. So for color balancing I have learned to rely mostly on histograms and gray references, and for other aspects I rely on head-to-head comparisons on the same medium. I don't really care if the absolute color coming off my screen happens to be different from the rest of my environment, as long as what should be gray in my image has R=G=B in pixel values and visually matches the gray surround and standard images that I display on the same screen at the same time. Simultaneous head-to-head comparisons I mostly trust; all others not so much.

At this point, I've probably dropped enough hints to suggest that I do not expect my user experience or my image outputs to be much improved by having carefully calibrated monitors. But I could be wrong about that, and in any case the general topic of color management is interesting to learn more about. I look forward to continued discussion.

--Rik

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by rjlittlefield »

chris_ma wrote:
Fri Jul 08, 2022 1:40 pm
cbphoto wrote:
Fri Jul 08, 2022 6:34 am
I recommend the book Real World Color Management: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting. These guys were at the vanguard of applied color science and have helped shaped the system we now use.
I can second that recommendation: it's a great book.
it's quite old now, but addresses the fundamental questions very well, and those haven't really changed.
It's also written in a very humorous way, which makes it fun to read.

chris
Thanks for the reference; a copy is on its way to me now.

--Rik

blekenbleu
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by blekenbleu »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 8:28 pm
To put this in a personal context, my own primary workspace is in a shared family room that has a large window, which my wife is adamant must be left uncovered during daylight hours. My normal workday spans from roughly 7:30 am to 11 pm (with copious breaks!), so during the span of a single day my monitors may be viewed in an environment that ranges from the blue of shade to the gray of clouds to a mix of cool & warm LED tubes.

I recognize that this is a wildly uncontrolled workspace. Most of my workspaces over the last 50 years have been. So for color balancing I have learned to rely mostly on histograms and gray references, and for other aspects I rely on head-to-head comparisons on the same medium. I don't really care if the absolute color coming off my screen happens to be different from the rest of my environment, as long as what should be gray in my image has R=G=B in pixel values and visually matches the gray surround and standard images that I display on the same screen at the same time. Simultaneous head-to-head comparisons I mostly trust; all others not so much.

At this point, I've probably dropped enough hints to suggest that I do not expect my user experience or my image outputs to be much improved by having carefully calibrated monitors. But I could be wrong about that, and in any case the general topic of color management is interesting to learn more about. I look forward to continued discussion.

--Rik
In olden days, I would e.g. obtain prints from color inkjet and laser or dye sublimation printers that were acceptable matches under halogen illumination
but unacceptable under daylight or various fluorescent and LED illuminations with supposedly good color rendering ratings.

It sounds like most of your interest is about camera images and displays, for which real color mixing is quite linear.
Most often, display color management reduces to removing one gamma,
performing 3x3 matrix multiplication to convert from one RGB primary set to another,
then applying another gamma, all of which modern workstations perform in real time.
For this, becoming comfortable with e.g. color grading controls in DaVinci Resolve
may be of more practical value than slogging thru much about
print colorant nonlinear mixing and ink coverage limitations.
Metaphot, Optiphot 1, 66; AO 10, 120, and EPIStar 2571
https://blekenbleu.github.io/microscope

chris_ma
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 8:28 pm
Now, as a matter of style I grant that my wording "Color management is a mess" may be seen as too harsh. To be less caustic, while retaining a bit of tongue-in-cheek, I might have written "Color management is messy", in the same neutral-valued sense that many things are messy but controllable with some care. Or to go even farther toward graciousness, I might say that "color management is intrinsically complicated, and folks who are deeply immersed in the field are to be complimented for getting a good handle on the production process."
hi Rik,

I definitely agree that it's messy and/or complicated.

I guess one of the questions is if we include viewing conditions which are outside of our controls under the "color management" label.

Personally, I consider "color management" the part which is under my influence and therefore I have under control - or maybe it would be better to describe it as "production color management" opposed to "consumption color management". the later term could be considered a contradiction in terms though, since I have no control over how somebody will watch my images, like how their monitor is set up, or under what light they will hang a print etc - so there simply is no color management to speak of.

I recently had the same image printed by 4 different print services (2 professional ones and 2 online services) on different papers to see which one I want to work with in future. 3 out of the 4 pretty much sent me prints which were very close to each other and to what I was expecting. the last one was a cheap fully automated print service where 2 papers looked good and 2 were quite off.

to summarise: In my personal experience color management works very well as long as I have the workflow under control, or work with people who know what they are doing, but can fall apart if I hand it off to people who don't know what their are doing or simply don't care.

(edit: fixed typo)
Last edited by chris_ma on Sun Jul 10, 2022 8:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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chris_ma
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

blekenbleu wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 7:10 am
It sounds like most of your interest is about camera images and displays, for which real color mixing is quite linear.
Most often, display color management reduces to removing one gamma,
performing 3x3 matrix multiplication to convert from one RGB primary set to another,
then applying another gamma, all of which modern workstations perform in real time.
For this, becoming comfortable with e.g. color grading controls in DaVinci Resolve
may be of more practical value than slogging thru much about
print colorant nonlinear mixing and ink coverage limitations.
For still images on monitors, color management has been rather straight forward and very solid for quite some time now.
All that's needed is getting a calibration probe, and make sure the working environment is standarized.

on consumer displays, Apple has helped a lot with their excellent default calibration and color management of their devices. their retina screens are very consistent across devices and generally have very good calibration (even though the black levels are a bit too low to make things look punchy).

with video, there still is the problem that there are no standarised embedded color profiles like we have with images, so it's not uncommon that the same file looks different when opened in different applications on the same machine with the same screen.

Davinci Resolve is a fantastic software for color grading, it wont help a lot with calibration issues though (in fact, it's a rather difficult software to calibrate since it ignores profiles by the OS and relies on devices hat can be hardware calibrated).
chris

cbphoto
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by cbphoto »

chris_ma wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 8:31 am
For still images on monitors, color management has been rather straight forward and very solid for quite some time now.
All that's needed is getting a calibration probe, and make sure the working environment is standarized.
Agreed. My workspace is a room with gray walls and color-correct lamps at a specific brightness. This is crucial (to me) for color accuracy on press (i.e., SWOP specs). Very similar to a SWOP viewing booth, except larger and with nice speakers for good tunes.
on consumer displays, Apple has helped a lot with their excellent default calibration and color management of their devices. their retina screens are very consistent across devices and generally have very good calibration (even though the black levels are a bit too low to make things look punchy).
Please clarify. Do you mean the blacks are too black? As in the Dmax is too high? IMO, the blacker the blacks (higher max density, but what’s the terminology for video?) the better contrast capability, thus punchier images.
with video, there still is the problem that there are no standarised embedded color profiles like we have with images, so it's not uncommon that the same file looks different when opened in different applications on the same machine with the same screen.
I’ve been using Adobe Premier/After Effects and encode all raw (C-Log) footage with the Rec.709 profile and have been getting good results. But given how much an HDTV can be manipulated by the end user, it only guarantees my colors are in gamut.
Davinci Resolve is a fantastic software for color grading, it wont help a lot with calibration issues though (in fact, it's a rather difficult software to calibrate since it ignores profiles by the OS and relies on devices hat can be hardware calibrated).
I’ve never used DaVinci. That’s a deep rabbit hole!
~ CB

chris_ma
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

cbphoto wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 10:49 am
on consumer displays, Apple has helped a lot with their excellent default calibration and color management of their devices. their retina screens are very consistent across devices and generally have very good calibration (even though the black levels are a bit too low to make things look punchy).
Please clarify. Do you mean the blacks are too black? As in the Dmax is too high? IMO, the blacker the blacks (higher max density, but what’s the terminology for video?) the better contrast capability, thus punchier images.
what I meant is that the very dark greys are getting clipped to black.
I haven't measured it, but I'd estimate that code values 0-5 (on a 0-255 8bit scale) are displayed as black, and only higher code values are starting to show detail.
On a good, well calibrated screen, a code value of 2 start to already visually differ from true black (code value 0)

the DMax is another term, which to me it indicates the darkest black a device can display. Apples retina screens also have an excellent DMax (being glossy helps with that), and high brightness, so good contrast to start with.

but the issue is that if I adjust an image on my calibrated monitor so I still have some shadow details, these usually gets lost when displayed on a Apple retina screen due to the clipping.
I assume this was done to make things look nice and punchy on a small screen under less then ideal lighting conditions, but it can be an annoyance if discussing color corrections with others which use those screens as their main device.
On the other hand, in my area those are the dominant devices anyway, so I have to adjust the images so they look good on Apple screens.
chris

cbphoto
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by cbphoto »

chris_ma wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 2:01 pm
what I meant is that the very dark greys are getting clipped to black.
I haven't measured it, but I'd estimate that code values 0-5 (on a 0-255 8bit scale) are displayed as black, and only higher code values are starting to show detail.
On a good, well calibrated screen, a code value of 2 start to already visually differ from true black (code value 0)

the DMax is another term, which to me it indicates the darkest black a device can display. Apples retina screens also have an excellent DMax (being glossy helps with that), and high brightness, so good contrast to start with.

but the issue is that if I adjust an image on my calibrated monitor so I still have some shadow details, these usually gets lost when displayed on a Apple retina screen due to the clipping.
I assume this was done to make things look nice and punchy on a small screen under less then ideal lighting conditions, but it can be an annoyance if discussing color corrections with others which use those screens as their main device.
On the other hand, in my area those are the dominant devices anyway, so I have to adjust the images so they look good on Apple screens.
Got it. Thanks!

Add to the mix the fact that some web browsers are not ICC savvy. This page provides a nice test:
https://cameratico.com/tools/web-browse ... ment-test/
~ CB

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