"Snaggy" wrote in message
I mean, the monitor is not to be set based on you camera / printer is it? It should be just right for the colorspace you use. Then why should I pay for a calibration tool, shouldn’t it be set right when I buy it? Or at least, shouldn’t I be able to download the calibration settings somewhere?
You’re applying common sense to the situation, which is hard to do and unusual, and you’re very close to correct. Manufacturers want their product to fly off the shelves of the retailer. Every marketing person knows that, whether its vegetables, fruit, clothing, or monitors, bright and saturated colors sell better. Therefore, monitors, especially LCD monitors, are way too bright and saturated .
Once you get your monitor home, you want to tone things down a bit so you can look at photographs reasonably well. In general, this means reducing the brightness a bit, making things a bit more yellow-orange (reducing the color temp), and knocking back the colors a bit. You can do this is with your eyes – load an image that you know has good looking skin tones and tweak away until the image looks good. You can also spend about $150 on a device such as the Eye One display, or the Spyder Pro, and have the job done automatically. Your choice.
By the way.. the process is (correct me if I’m mistaken)
calibrate the screen (does it depend on the color space you’re using?) load your photo (mine are adobeRGB took froma canon 350d) Load the printer profile to see how it looks like when on paper (an agfa printer on agfa papaer)
print it out
More or less, though problems can creep in at each step in the process camera->Photoshop->monitor and finally Photoshop->printer. Many people have spent many hours and many dollars trying to get the kinks out, and still remain dissatisfied.
no calibration needed for the camera, right?
Please help me out I’m full of stuff I can’t understand how to join together
Of course there are reams of discussion of how to do just that. If it can capture or product an image, it can and has been calibrated to the max. Ignore camera calibration for the time being, and hopefully forever.
Ever notice it’s the people who stay in the five star hotels who are usually the least happy with their accommodations? You and I are happy if the apartment we rented for 40 bucks a night is free of bedbugs, and if the rats have the decency to at least stay in the walls. Ok, maybe not that bad, but close, right? Five star people, OTOH, expecting to pay top dollar for the very best, and all they can think about is how the maitre’d brought them the wrong kind of olive in their Manhattan, or that the OJ had pulp in it. It’s the same with color calibration. The harder you try, the fussier you get, and the less happy you are.
Here’s how to get good, solid three star color:
1) set up your monitor so that a few known good images look the way they should. Do a google for "calibration image" and look for something with lots of skin tones and gray step charts. It doesn’t matter which one it is, though it should be an sRGB image. Open it in Photoshop and use Convert to Profile to verify that the image is sRGB. If not, use Photoshop’s convert to profile to make it so
2) print a gray step wedge, using a one inch sliver of paper. Make sure you can distinguish all the squares, and that the squares are more or less neutral, particularly the highlights and midtones (don’t worry so much about the shadows). Your printer may work right out of the box, or as an sRGB printer. If not, adjust the color settings of your printer to accomplish this.
3) after the step wedge is set up, print your test image. Look good? Great, you’re ready to experiment with one of your camera images.
4) I suggest you stick with sRGB as your working space in Photoshop. Yes, people swear by other color spaces, and they do excellent images. These are things perhaps to explore in the future.
5) Check out curves 🙂
—
Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com
