Final Color Correcting

[marksee]

I have been struggling with an issue for a while. The renderings I am creating are being both printed for presentation and print, as well as displayed digitally through various venues (presentations, internet, etc) The problem I have is that with the countless number of monitors that will be displaying this work, they look drastically different on each one.... Some downright dreadful. I don't know what the solution is though... I have color calibrated my monitor to optimize prints, however, if everyone else is looking at it through un-calibrated monitors, what is the solution? Its pretty depressing to see your work on your screen as the way you think everyone else sees it, then to see it in a different way (as everyone will usually see it) as looking horrible because of the color/brighness/contrast difference.... Is there a good solution for this? I won't even get started on animations....

[BrianKitts]

short of going on a round the world trip and calibrating the monitors, projectors, and printers of everyone that you send your product.... there really isn't anything you can do..... it sucks but some things you just can't control.

 

I am now trying to make an effort to get a calibration run for anyone that I am working with in-house, speacially the interior designers, that helps to cut down on the comments of "the render is too dark..." due to a dim monitor.... color isn't the only problem, brightness is a pain too......but working with people out of house you are going to run into problems now and then.

 

And if you think it's bad enough trying to make sure they are using a projector with proper color settings... I once had a designer project onto a yellow wall because they had no screen in the room they were presenting in, and the only large enough surface to project on was YELLOW!

[marksee]

So the solution is that there is no solution.... Well, I suppose part of me already knew that and I was hoping for a shot in the dark. I am half tempted to do all the color correcting on a standard monitor with default settings!!!! The problem I find is that even between my two computers (laptop and desktop) The image looks horrible on one and great on the other.... I just wish I could find a happy medium.... It's almost comical because during the design phase etc. so much attention is put into the materials, light setup up, color saturations etc... then when it comes time to present or broadcast/print its like..... oh well... it looks fine!!!!

[BrianKitts]

well no solution for those out of house that you send files to. But in house for all the prints that you send out, and printing in your office can be controlled with the right color calibration software/hardware.

 

there's no reason that your laptop and tower shouldn't have perfectly matching settings. When I say perfectly matching, I'm not saying you copy the RGB settings of one to the other, but I mean running a calibration profile for each will give you a perfect match.

 

I love my eye-one, I just started with a new company and it made the top of my list when I spec'd out a machine, it wasn't negotiable. After fighting mismatched monitors for years and then finally doing it the right way, you can never go back.

 

There are other calibration profiliers that have been discussed alot here on the forums, but the eye-one is great if it's within your budget.

 

http://usa.gretagmacbethstore.com/

[Jeff Mottle]

I have been struggling with an issue for a while. The renderings I am creating are being both printed for presentation and print, as well as displayed digitally through various venues (presentations, internet, etc) The problem I have is that with the countless number of monitors that will be displaying this work, they look drastically different on each one....

 

While you can't calibrate every monitor in the world, you can ensure you embed your images with the proper ICC profiles. If it's being viewed on a display, embeding an sRGB profile will help ensure some consistancy as all OS understand sRGB. You are still subject to whatever color casts or color issues might exist on a 3rd party monitor, however this will certainly help. Simply calibrating and profiling a display is NOT enough for a color managed workflow. While this certainly is a large step towards this goal, ALL of your devices need to be profiled and/or calibrated and you need to tag your images with profiles that describe how they were created.

 

You should also softproof your image in photoshop with MonitorRGB so you can ensure you color correct your images correctly. Normally you save one version in your working space as your base image and save out profiled and color corrected images for each output (display, printshop, etc)

 

Why would you do this? As technology improves and displays and devices are able to output larger gamuts, you want to ensure you don't compremise the original image's color gamut.

 

there's no reason that your laptop and tower shouldn't have perfectly matching settings. When I say perfectly matching, I'm not saying you copy the RGB settings of one to the other, but I mean running a calibration profile for each will give you a perfect match.

 

This depends of the gamut of your display. For example the gamut of a Macbook Pro is significantly less (slightly smaller than sRGB) than that of a Dell HC 30" which is very close to AdobeRGB. Depending upon the image you are viewing, even two perfectly calibrated displays can have significant differences if their gamuts vary enough.

[Jeff Mottle]

I have color calibrated my monitor to optimize prints

 

What do you mean by this? You should only be calibrating and profiling a monitor to a know standard like 6500K / 2.2 Gamma for example. You use color management to ensure one device's interpretation of color is understood by another.

[marksee]

well, we have downloaded the color profiles for our plotter and matched the images with them in photoshop. Simulating paper color for paper type etc.... seems to be working ok, but it still doesn't really solve the computer to computer display. I suppose I mispoke talking about monitor calibration short of calibrating it to display what the plotter will produce. I had assumed that photoshop would save the color profiles with the image as it compressed the .jpg. Is there another process I should be following? I suppose I need to do some research on this softproofing method with monitor rgb as you suggest.

[Jeff Mottle]

I had assumed that photoshop would save the color profiles with the image as it compressed the .jpg. Is there another process I should be following? I suppose I need to do some research on this softproofing method with monitor rgb as you suggest.

 

You need to go into Edit -> Color Settings to enable color management in Photoshop and then you need to ensure you embed or assign profiles automatically or using Edit -> Assign profile or Edit -> Convert to Profile.

 

In any case yes you do need to do some reading as you don't want to hack your way around color management or you will make things worse and possibly corrupt the underlying color data of your images.

 

This is the book you want http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FReal-World-Color-Management-2nd%2Fdp%2F0321267222%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1197415802%26sr%3D8-1&tag=cgarchitect-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

 

It's a pretty heavy read, but well worth the effort

[marksee]

Thanks for all the help.... This is undoubtedly my next step.

[bjornkn]

There's a great web site that covers a lot of those tricky photo/image issues, at http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm

It really explains things very well.

 

BTW, one thing is when you see your own images on someone elses bad monitor, but I have a client that prints my images on completely uncalibrated (or with wrong settings?) printers, so that they typically get a greenish tint. Not fun...

They sometimes rescale them unproportionally too, but that is another matter...