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Author Topic: Matching the monitor to a print.  (Read 6303 times)

Enchanter

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digitaldog

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #1 on: February 26, 2011, 09:04:31 pm »

So the idea is, nothing matches the print? Or a soft proof, which takes the calibrated display and the output profile into account are closer?

An emissive display and reflective print will never match 100%. The idea is to get closer. If you could get 95% of the way, using color management and soft proofing vs. 92% without, which would you pick?

The proof is in the print. But how do you get the data closer before you hit print?
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artobest

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2011, 11:06:58 am »

That article doesn't make any sense. How can I tell if a print I have made for a customer is the 'best' representation of the file if I can't first achieve a good rendering on my display? And, assuming for a minute that the file contains, as he seems to suggest, definitive descriptions of colour, and that the point of CM is to, in his words "make each device ... represent the file as accurately as it can", how is that different from striving for a screen-to-print match? 
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petercook80

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2011, 11:51:17 am »

Seems like a good article to me, and makes sense. If we profile our devices we will get them displaying colour as best they can. This will mean we will have consistency which will help in trying to get a print to match the screen, because they are very different devices they will never match but through profiling we have that consistency that will enable us to get better at judging and predicting the differences.
He is not saying its not worth trying, more that peoples expectations are perhaps higher that the reality of the process.
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digitaldog

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2011, 12:15:19 pm »

That article doesn't make any sense.

Much of it doesn’t, I agree.
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One of the biggest misconceptions in color management is the belief that you calibrate your monitor and printer to match each other.
What makes it a myth, I get very good visual matches between the two. They are not perfect nor 100% but they are very close. One could say its impossible to shoot a transparency and then make a print or reproduce it to have what the creator feels is a match. Lets throw up our arms and just forgo process control in terms of image capture, film processing and press processing, the two will never match.
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Let’s start with an example from music. Consider this: If a guitarist and a cellist were playing the same piece of music, would you expect the guitar to sound like the cello?
No, but we could interpret the music as both as being the Brandenburg concertos. And we could say that the two sound far more similar than a cello and a base drum!
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We all know that the character of instruments is different
Just as we know the character of a Polaroid and a transparency, or an emissive display and a print have differing characteristics but we can still extrapolate the effects of the two, just as we can say that the transparency and the printed piece do not match (or do match to our satisfaction).
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The problem with the idea of making your monitor and printer “match” is that it forgets about the file itself…and the fact that the file is the most accurate representation of color.
That’s pretty nonsensical! The file is a big pile of numbers. Those numbers are “accurate” (a buzz word) to what?
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They are the most accurate representation, even though they record color in a numeric form our eyes can’t see.
Yup, without a display, my eyes can’t “see” the numbers.
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The problem with monitors and printers is that they are each limited in the colors they can reproduce.
The weak link being the gamut of the display, true. But an awful lot of colors can fall within gamut, so what about those numbers (and the colors we see from those numbers)?
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Well, you can’t just feed a pixel value of 211R 0G 0B from the file into a printer or monitor and expect to get the right color red.
But you said the numbers in the file were accurate? But wait, farther down you say:
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We’ve done side by side tests with challenging prints with out of gamut colors, comparing a print under 4700k SoLux to the monitor, and turning the softproof on and off, and the monitor was more accurate with softproof off.
It begs the question, how can a document in an output agnostic color space match the print closer than when you ask the CMS to attempt to better map out of gamut colors, contrast ratio and paper white? Seems something is wrong in this workflow. So all RGB working spaces, which differ greatly match all output devices better than using the profile that defines the output device along with the display used for a soft proof? Something is seriously wrong here!
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You have to realize that devices like monitors do not represent the print 100% of the time so you can shatter the myth of the match.
Correct, they do not match 100%, so is 95% useful? Why calibrate the display at all if the idea is, without a 100% match, matching a print to a display is a myth and as stated above, just forgo soft proofing?
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This is the important point. Color management IS NOT trying to make the monitor match the printer. Instead, it’s trying to make each device, independently of any other device, represent the file as accurately as it can, within its own limitations.
So this is only and always a display issue? Or those who proof (cross render), pull contract proofs and so forth are unaware that color management is not trying to produce matches of dissimilar media?
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Now, I’m not recommending you throw away your color-accurate monitor, but to understand and work with its limitations.
Best point in the piece and one that could be stated without the rest of the article. Matching even two displays 100% is probably not possible. In fact, if you want to get anal, take two brand new Epson or Canon prints and send the same RGB values to both, measure a few thousand color patches and you’ll soon see, they do not produce 100% match. Is an Atomic Clock 100% accurate? If not, what does this tell us about the inability to tell time in an accurate fashion?

The entire article could have been a paragraph. Differing devices do not match 100% (and it be damn useful to define how you measure these metrics, the accuracy of the measuring device and process but lets skip that). The goal is to get the closest match the technology and price point allows. Its a bad idea to throw the baby out with the bath water. If color management reduces mismatches by 15%, is that useful to the end user, even if when viewing the two media in context, we don’t see everything matching perfectly.

The author should also be asking why, when viewing an RGB working space that has no relationship to an output device or the output device numbers, does he get a worse match when the CMS takes that output device into account with soft proofing. Why do so many users find better matches with soft proofing compared to the working space than he does? Could it be something in the profiles, display calibration, print viewing, environmental conditions or the users eyesight be suspect?

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digitaldog

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2011, 12:21:05 pm »

Seems like a good article to me, and makes sense. If we profile our devices we will get them displaying colour as best they can.

Profiles only describe device behavior, they don’t make the device better or worse. Calibration can do this but many devices can’t nor need to be calibrated (altered). The raw output of an Epson printer with the native drive (using No Color Adjustment) is what it is. If you want to alter it (say linearize it), you need a 3rd party RIP or driver. Using this native driver, you profile its behavior, you don’t alter it one bit. Its not better because you profiled it, its simply being described and defined.

Display calibration can make that device display the colors not as best as they can but such they produce a visual match to our output. Since the author appears to be unable to produce this match, the calibration of the display is the first area I’d examine as being the issue.
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JRSmit

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #6 on: February 27, 2011, 02:35:19 pm »

Andrew,

+1. To add to your statements, having a description of the printer behaviour (aka a profile) allows us to alter the image data such that the print appears much closer to what we see of the image on screen(display). I believe that that is the most important aspect of soft-proofing.
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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #7 on: February 27, 2011, 07:32:49 pm »

Holy Guacamole! This is confusing.How can you ever get a file printed on paper using cmyk inks to look the same as a file appears on an rgb monitor, whatever type it is? They are animals of a different color, so to speak. Your goal is to simply (that's easy to say....) do your best to adjust them to appear similar. An image on a backlit screen will rarely, if ever appear in flat print as it did on the screen.
With that said, (lol) I have a question regarding monitor calibration I hope someone could clarify. I have 3 computers with one monitor and a switch so I can go from one to the other without changing the monitor. If I calibrate the monitor, will I need to recalibrate it when I change computers? It seems to me that as long as the screen resolution is set the same on each computer the monitor should be ok, but I'm not sure. I appreciate whatever helpful feedback anyone can offer. Thanks.
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gromit

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #8 on: February 28, 2011, 12:19:20 am »

A good summary and introduction to colour management, especially the point that the file defines the colour, not how it's rendered. I wouldn't agree so much on device (monitor, printer) limitations as, thanks to current technology, most files I get to see are in gamut on both.
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graeme

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #9 on: February 28, 2011, 03:33:26 am »

Holy Guacamole! This is confusing.How can you ever get a file printed on paper using cmyk inks to look the same as a file appears on an rgb monitor, whatever type it is? They are animals of a different color, so to speak. Your goal is to simply (that's easy to say....) do your best to adjust them to appear similar. An image on a backlit screen will rarely, if ever appear in flat print as it did on the screen.

That's what soft proofing is for.

It's not perfect but I wouldn't want to work without it.

Graeme
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JRSmit

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #10 on: February 28, 2011, 03:43:42 am »

Holy Guacamole! This is confusing.How can you ever get a file printed on paper using cmyk inks to look the same as a file appears on an rgb monitor, whatever type it is? They are animals of a different color, so to speak. Your goal is to simply (that's easy to say....) do your best to adjust them to appear similar. An image on a backlit screen will rarely, if ever appear in flat print as it did on the screen.
With that said, (lol) I have a question regarding monitor calibration I hope someone could clarify. I have 3 computers with one monitor and a switch so I can go from one to the other without changing the monitor. If I calibrate the monitor, will I need to recalibrate it when I change computers? It seems to me that as long as the screen resolution is set the same on each computer the monitor should be ok, but I'm not sure. I appreciate whatever helpful feedback anyone can offer. Thanks.
You are right in the sense that the result displayed on the monitor will not completely match a properly lit image on paper. But it allows you to get an idea, and take appropriate measures to compensate. So in fact it should not be confusing, just read the article of Andrew "why are my prints too dark" , and articles of Jeff Schewe/Martin Evening/ Andrew etc on how to compensate using curves, saturation, etc. Above all experiment yourselves to get the best out of it.

Using multiple computers on one monitor, the need to calibrate per computer/monitor pair depends on whether the whole calibration and profiling is done within the monitor, and if the output of the 3 display-cards in the computers are identical. If either of the two is not the case, a calibration per computer-monitor pair is needed. Since that takes only a little time compared to time spend in image development, it should not be an issue.
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tho_mas

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #11 on: February 28, 2011, 10:16:56 am »

Quote
We’ve done side by side tests with challenging prints with out of gamut colors, comparing a print under 4700k SoLux to the monitor, and turning the softproof on and off, and the monitor was more accurate with softproof off.
It begs the question, how can a document in an output agnostic color space match the print closer than when you ask the CMS to attempt to better map out of gamut colors, contrast ratio and paper white? Seems something is wrong in this workflow. So all RGB working spaces, which differ greatly match all output devices better than using the profile that defines the output device along with the display used for a soft proof? Something is seriously wrong here!
not necessarily. Depends on the paper, the profiles and the softproof settings. For instance... if he compared a print made on a paper containing OBAs and at the same time his softproof settings were set to simulate paper colour it comes to no surprise that the screen matches the print better with "softproof off". He could still softproof - without the simulation of paper colour - but we don't know his settings. So unless we don't know the actual settings and the actual paper & profiles we can't say that there is something seriously wrong.
Paper color in fact is the most tricky part in softproofing ... and as long as measurment devices don't "see" colours as human beeings see colours softproofing will always be a compromise and a matter of interpretation.
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rmyers

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #12 on: February 28, 2011, 06:27:57 pm »

Here he seems to be for monitor calibration and even recommends NEC monitors.


http://aspencreekphoto.com/blog/


Wonder how much money they make from proof prints?


Edit:  I have used them to make prints and was completely satisfied.  In fact, they are beautiful.
« Last Edit: February 28, 2011, 06:55:01 pm by rmyers »
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Schewe

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #13 on: February 28, 2011, 06:39:50 pm »

Wonder how much money they make from proof prints?

Note that they are a photo lab...the OP's article is a self-fulfilling prophecy...the print and the display can't match. Well, doooh. The article is designed to manage expectations. The upside is they do offer paper profiles for their printers...so they are better than many labs.
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rmyers

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #14 on: February 28, 2011, 06:53:55 pm »

I have used them a couple of times and was completely satisfied.  Should have stated that in my post.

I think you are correct about managing expectations.  It has to be frustrating for them, or anyone, to have to try to "coach" color management long distance to people who don't understand it or don't have the equipment for it.  I am just beginning to get a grip on it after reading and researching for several months. A couple of books and this forum have been  tremendous tools.  Hard proofing may actually be their best avenue for a lot of or even most of their customers.


My first printer arrives Wednesday.  I will soon see if I have grasped the concept as much as I think.
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gromit

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #15 on: February 28, 2011, 08:27:42 pm »

I think you are correct about managing expectations.  It has to be frustrating for them, or anyone, to have to try to "coach" color management long distance to people who don't understand it or don't have the equipment for it.

I know exactly where the author of the original is coming from as I see the same thing over and over, namely that what the image owner sees on their screen represents some sort of absolute truth. Worse are those that tell you their monitor is "calibrated" ... never mind that their monitor is crap, the calibration settings are all over the place and the lighting in their working environment isn't conducive to Photoshop work. This isn't to say that good tools and practices can't make it work well, just that many aren't helped by the industry telling them that "calibration" and "good" profiles (whatever they are) are all that's needed and what they see on the screen will magically appear on the paper.
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digitaldog

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #16 on: March 01, 2011, 07:35:13 am »

Worse are those that tell you their monitor is "calibrated" ... never mind that their monitor is crap, the calibration settings are all over the place and the lighting in their working environment isn't conducive to Photoshop work.

Agreed! Anyone can calibrate a display improperly and get a severe mismatch between it and a print. Getting a close simulation, not so easy.

Much of the incorrect expectations are generated from marketing of displays, (we have a 1000:1 contrast ratio, isn't that great?) and CMS manufacturers (get an accurate match), while providing tools that are either confusing or ineffective. There's pliantly of blame to go around. But producing good matching isn't the holy grail. Its doable.
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RichSeiling

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #17 on: March 01, 2011, 01:14:55 pm »

Thanks for all who have commented on this article.

rmyers and gromit have astutely surmised that this article is aimed at setting expectations. Those of us with experience have learned the limitations of our displays and print to display matching, but that is a small group of people. As a lab owner I also have to deal with the other 99% of users who do not as yet have the experience to manage their expectations, so this article is written to guide them in that.  

Most users aren’t using a monitor that experts would accept as color accurate, aren’t profiling it with hardware, and aren’t comparing prints to monitor in a known and controlled environment. Yet these same users are also still under the impression that they are and that they should be getting an exact match to what they see. We’ve all been in that place as we learned photography, learned our expectations, and learned how to achieve them.

The context also comes from the fine art printing goal. I’m not setting expectations for contract CMYK proofs, or other printing processes. I’m talking about fine art prints with the sole purpose being to express the deep emotions of the human soul.  In working to achieve this over the years with top photographers like Galen Rowell, Jack Dykinga, Robert Glenn Ketchum, and thousands of others, my printmakers and I have delved into many of the corners of what our materials and processes can produce to try and achieve their vision. In doing so we’re trying to eek out the last few percent. Since hard proofs are an inherent part of this process, we rely on them as the final arbitrator, since our artists sign their name to a piece of paper and hang it on a wall, and not a monitor. We’ve also seen time and time again where monitors and soft proofing would not show us these last 1%, maybe even last 0.1% of things we’re looking to achieve, so we set our expectations of what a monitor can do on that.

You also have to take into account that what a typical photographer does when he looks at a print compared to a monitor is not a mathematical measurement, It is completely colored by his experience and perception.

When I look at one of my pictures of Yosemite, I’m looking at it with the full memory of standing there taking it, of the smells, the wind on my face, the sun and clouds, and of every other experience I’ve had in that place and in my life. So there is far more I, and any other photographer is expecting of a print when they are doing the mechanical process of comparing a print to the monitor, and there is no way to calibrate this excitement into a print, or calibrate the disappointment of a print that doesn’t meet our full emotional expectations out of the process. That’s why it’s art, and that’s why it’s hard and takes work.

Are calibrated monitors great? You bet! I’ve been one of the biggest advocates for them for over a decade.  Do I and my staff use them? Absolutely! Are we always looking for ways to improve the process? Definitely! When applied properly with experience AND educated expectations, do these tools get most photographers to their desired results? Most definitely! We do it every day!

But the tools do not magically bridge all these gaps as most photographers think they do, and I run into these photographers every day. If you already understand that they are not magical tools, than this article was not aimed at you.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2011, 02:31:50 pm by RichSeiling »
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digitaldog

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Re: Matching the monitor to a print.
« Reply #18 on: March 01, 2011, 02:25:14 pm »

Agreed, improper use of tools and suboptimal tools produce less than desirable results, especially for those with excessive and unwarranted expectations.
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