Why don't you simply use D50 for the monitor? Or the measured "ambient light" value of your viewing booth? Because it doesn't look accurate to your eyes.
I totally agree! Its why in the old CRT days, calibrating them to D50 didn’t produce a match to a so called D50 viewing condition. Its why I start the process at D65 then adjust the values to get a visual match.
Finally you won't get profiles with a "good" reverse look up everywhere; often you get a profile that is good (or even perfect) for printing but not tweaked for accurate softproofing.
The system is far from ideal. I do adjust the white point to produce a match with the soft proof on.
What puzzles me in this context is that people recommend to get a visuell match of monitor and paper but at the same time recommend to view the softproof abs.col. on the monitor… i.e. to activate the simulation of paper color that effectively changes the monitor white + luminance. Simply doesn't make sense at all.
Its generally more about getting a match with a better contrast ratio, especially today where we have LCDs that far exceed that of a print (although better solutions do allow us to control this which is very useful). IOW, the Absolute intent is more useful for showing us a white that has a white and black that doesn’t assume white being the whitest the display can produce and black that is a black hole in terms of the display. I find that it helps to do this because of the big disconnect in display versus paper white once a white point has been adjusted. Note too, there is no reason why, with a good display system like the NEC SpectraView that you cannot make multiple calibration targets and associated profiles which are loaded on the fly. Other solutions kind of force you into a white point and contrast ratio that is supposed to be good for all papers and profiles. Not ideal. Going a step farther, NEC’s newer units allow us to load an actual output profile into their software for a creation of this “more ideal, soft proof per product” concept. But as I said, all this is still far from a totally ideal situation for soft proofing.
Either the monitor matches prior to activating the softproof or after activating the softproof.
The goal is after. Prior, I’m editing the image visually to look as good as it can, in this RGB working space preview. Its my master that will have to undergo some editing while in soft proofing mode, on adjustment layers, based on each paper profile, the rendering intent I decide that image needs etc.
The abs.col. RI does not use a dedicated table in the profile. It uses the rel.col. table but takes the media white point into account (which is an approximation anyway).
Abs.col. RI and rel.col.
Considering the only differences are the white rendering, is there a reason you think two tables would be necessary?
As to the aboved mentioned "industry standards": IMO, if you want to use them you have to set everything to the standards.
Standards like this are useful when they work and when people need to work in a collaborative environment. Not everyone does. They use different viewing booths, different display manufacturers etc. In a true collaborative environment, a true reference environment, even the exact display make and model, the same Colorimeters (ideally the same lot of Colorimeters) along with a very high grade reference device would be used. Any shift from these items will cause issues with matching.
Also let's not forget that the industry standards allow a certain range of color differences, i.e. tolerances. But a difference of 2 DeltaE for the white point is actually inacceptable, even 1 DeltaE is inedible… at least for me (whereas a difference of, say, 4 DeltaE in high saturated, dark blues or so might be almost indiscernible).
And this is easily a delta one can find just by measuring color in the center and then the edges of even a good quality display. As I said, this is all far from ideal!
So, to me, it doesn't make sense to calibrate the display to match paper white visually and to set the softroof to simulate paper color at the same time and I am curious how you eliminate this contradiction…?
It makes sense if whoever is doing this results in that visual match or the elusive and often difficult goal of WYSIWYG. And in the end, an emissive display and a reflective print will never perfectly match. We hope that we can view a soft proof and with maybe one or two prints, get our work done without any surprises. Soft proofing is just that, a goal in avoiding as much expensive hard proofing as possible. It could be better. Its not close to perfect but it seems many users who struggle with it and get close find it useful.
