choosing a luminance value

[designpartners]

Hi,

First a bit of background.
I've just purchased the i1Display Pro and the i1Photo Pro with the aim of implementing a colour management system within our company.
We are a Product Design consultancy and create a lot of assets digitally through Photoshop, illustrator, various rendering packages as well as product photography, the same files are often worked on by various people on various workstations within the office .

We use Dell Workstations, high end Quadro video cards, most machines have 2 displays, generally a Wide gamut Dell U2410 and a wacom Cintiq 21 UX (or sometimes a cheap second monitor), most of our laptops are the Dell M6400/6500 Covet edition with the RGB LED screens. We have roughly 30 workstations.

we print to an in-house Epson 9900

Our ultimate output are the consumer electronics that you are using to view this webpage, working wit clients such as Logitech, Dell, HP.
During a project, I would estimate 80% of our output is for screen (many of which are outside our office and our control), 15% would be physical models (production tooling, concept models etc) and maybe 5% print. We use a combination of Prints (from A3 to A0) PPT presentations and models to present our work to clients.

So, here's my problem..

With so much of our output being for screen, we need to choose a luminance value which suits this medium, also much of our screen output is viewed by our clients on what are more than likely non calibrated displays.

but at the same time, it's important that what we print is a good match for what our design intent is (i.e. what we show on screen)

I've been running tests, where I set my display to 120cm/m2 and anything that I receive from a client I can't make out properly (a lot of consumer electronics are black on black) and in the same way, if I make it look right on my screen, so I can match with prints, then it looks way too bright on our clients machine.

is there a way to run both profiles? or have a way to switch between? or do what Scott Kelby does and simply brighten the image and make a scaled test print for the sake of the couple bucks it'll cost?  If I was to priorities, the consistency among the various workstation would be first, getting an accurate print would be second.  

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

James    

[Rainer Ots]

I've been running tests, where I set my display to 120cm/m2 and anything that I receive from a client I can't make out properly (a lot of consumer electronics are black on black) and in the same way, if I make it look right on my screen, so I can match with prints, then it looks way too bright on our clients machine.

If you work with lots of dark images then low ambient light is really helpful (and a monitor with good deep blacks).

[digitaldog]

My suggestion is nail the print to screen matching. Trying to hit anything for web viewing is very problematic. You can get your workstations using your color managed web browsers to produce a match. But as soon as you upload, and others view the content, all bets are off. You have no control over others viewing the content. Do they use a color managed brower? Do they calibrate their displays? If so, to what targets? What if they are viewing on a cell phone or tablet?

When calibrating, you can target to some match. You have one in house device (your Epson) that you can match with some work (see:http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/why_are_my_prints_too_dark.shtml). That has no relationship to web content elsewhere. One match is certainly better than no matching.

[designpartners]

If you work with lots of dark images then low ambient light is really helpful (and a monitor with good deep blacks).

Thanks for the info - we are looking into monitor hoods alright.

My suggestion is nail the print to screen matching. Trying to hit anything for web viewing is very problematic. You can get your workstations using your color managed web browsers to produce a match. But as soon as you upload, and others view the content, all bets are off. You have no control over others viewing the content. Do they use a color managed brower? Do they calibrate their displays? If so, to what targets? What if they are viewing on a cell phone or tablet?

When calibrating, you can target to some match. You have one in house device (your Epson) that you can match with some work (see:http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/why_are_my_prints_too_dark.shtml). That has no relationship to web content elsewhere. One match is certainly better than no matching.

But, when the majority of our output are to screens outside our control, the vast majority of which will not be calibrated, and therefore be a very bright screen, it would mean having to darken nearly all of our output in order to best guess/approximate what it will look on our clients screens - our clients who essentially pay our bills so we really have to do everything we can (short of flying to all continents every few weeks to calibrate their monitors) to ensure it looks good. we may have to accept that that it will not be perfect.

I know all bets are off once it goes to the web / to a screen out of our control, but at the same time, we can assume that laptops and screens sold out of the box will be brighter than a colour managed display with a a luminance of 120 or lower..

the majority of our screen output is to PDF, not web btw.

I also know you are right, we can control the screen to print, so maybe we should, but at what cost to the rest of our workflow?

One match is certainly better than no matching.

true indeed, but either way we should have in house screen match also between the 30 workstations, which is also pretty important.

hmmmm I'm not sure what to do......  

[Ken Bennett]

I have a similar issue. My primary clients are web developers and print designers, and all of them are working on Macs at full screen brightness. If I calibrate my display for a wide-gamut color space at 120cd/m2, the resulting images do not look good anywhere. I end up calibrating my NEC display for sRGB at 240 cd/m2, and the images look great both on our web site and in print publications.

Note that I do not do any fine art printing at work. When I want to print on my Epson 3800 at home, I use a display that is calibrated to the lower printer brightness, and it works well, even with the files from my office. (Though I usually start from the raw file and run it through Lightroom, rather than using the sRGB jpeg from our work archive.)

[designpartners]

I have a similar issue. My primary clients are web developers and print designers, and all of them are working on Macs at full screen brightness. If I calibrate my display for a wide-gamut color space at 120cd/m2, the resulting images do not look good anywhere. I end up calibrating my NEC display for sRGB at 240 cd/m2, and the images look great both on our web site and in print publications.

yeah I'm thinking of doing something similar - maybe dedicate a workstation to printing - I'm currently building a printing/viewing/mounting area with a pantone viewing box, a set of solux lights, 8'x4' cutting mat and our 9900 so it could fit in there pretty well.. we also have a temperature and humidity controlled spray booth which I'm looking forward to exploiting but that's for another time!

it sounds like it's the only viable option, but I don't have to make a decision until the new year so there's time to think about it and hopefully get some more feedback.

is it possible to have multiple profiles saved and choose which one to use and when? for example, a 240cd/m2 profile for general day to day work and a 120cd/m2 profile for printing (without having to go and profile the monitor all over again). it sounds like it could work but maybe there are issues I'm not thinking about - your eyes adjusting, display lag maybe when changing profiles something else?

More help appreciated!

Thanks,

James

 

[Ken Bennett]

is it possible to have multiple profiles saved and choose which one to use and when? for example, a 240cd/m2 profile for general day to day work and a 120cd/m2 profile for printing (without having to go and profile the monitor all over again). it sounds like it could work but maybe there are issues I'm not thinking about - your eyes adjusting, display lag maybe when changing profiles something else?

This does sound like it should work, sure. I've not tried it. My current solution of a separate workstation for printing is working well for now, so I don't want to break that...

Good luck.

[digitaldog]

is it possible to have multiple profiles saved and choose which one to use and when?
 

You can with an NEC that supports SpectraView software or Multiprofiler. Make as many target calibrations and profiles as you wish, load on the fly in the software that calibration and profile.