Screen calibration

[Jonathan]

Hmm this is interesting.

I just got a new MacBook Pro    It's quite nice but I'm going to be doing some critical work so I wanted to set the screen up.  [BTW I paid extra for the anti-reflective]

I ran my trusty Huey on it and it warmed the screen up.  Like a lot.  OK......

I got out my brand new X-rite Passport which is a set of colour swatches of very precise colours.  Set a manual white balance off the absolutely neutral grey and then took a calibration shot with the D3.  I used this to build a camera calibration profile.  This means that under this lighting shots using that profile and that camera will be very very accurate.

Looked at it on screen.  "Hmm, too warm."  Most colours were right but skin tones are a little too orange.  Switch back to out of the box screen calibration and it's as close as you could expect.

So...no calibration for this screen    Looks like a factory set Mac is better than a "carefully calibrated" one.

[Jonathan]

Forgot to say.... that anti reflec screen is dead nice.  And the lappie seems pretty swift.

[picsfor]

i never cease to be amazed at the ways you can slip in to a conversation that you've got a new toy 

Is it configured with the Apple profile for use with Photoshop?

[hevans]

I can fully understand why you wanted a non-reflective screen. But...

Why do they make highly reflective screens? Are they trying to irritate and annoy?

Is there some benefit to them that escapes my experiences?

H.

[Jonathan]

Is there some benefit to them that escapes my experiences?

Yes.  It sells more 'puters.

"Research" showed Dixons that the best selling TV in their stores was the one with the brightness set the highest on the display set.  The glossy screens are very bright and very contrasty.  They look (to most people) totally gorgeous.  And browsing PCWorld the other day (to see if they had a matt on display) they totally destroyed anything on any PC laptop.  Closest look was a Samsung TV.

When they came out the matt was a no cost option.  So all photographers chose them.  Now they are £41 and build to order only.  So they get £41 more from lots of photographers.

Is it configured with the Apple profile for use with Photoshop?

Huh?  I have no idea what that means....

[picsfor]

My iMac has a colour profile for use with Photoshop and Lightroom - does quite a nice job with the printers.
I just have to up the image by a stop when printing but otherwise it is near a perfect reproduction of what i get on the screen.
I remember being impressed that Apple and Adobe had bothered to get together to sort out a colour profile. i think mine synched when installing the Adobe stuff.

May have slightly mis read it some where but i'm sure i'm fairly close to the point.

[anglefire]

AFAIK, PS and LR use the installed monitor profile - generally unlike Internet explorer (Unless it changed with IE8?) and most other programmes - which is what I think you mean

[picsfor]

you may be right - i just remember looking in CS4 and Lightroom to check colour profiles to see that they listed an Apple RGB as well as Adobe sRGB, Adobe 1998 RGB, CMYK etc so always concluded that they must have at least had an exchange of e-mails... Not least of which, as i say the colours are always so spot on except for needing to up the image to be printed by a stop or so to compensate for the brightness of the screen. 

[Jonathan]

you may be right - i just remember looking in CS4 and Lightroom to check colour profiles to see that they listed an Apple RGB as well as Adobe sRGB, Adobe 1998 RGB, CMYK etc

Ah I see.  No those aren't screen profiles.  They are file profiles.  I've always thought it was silly to list them in the monitor profile area.

@Angel - most Apple apps interpret the profile correctly.  Even Firefox can be made profile aware now.  AFAIK IE8 still assumes everything is sRGB.  But again, those are file profiles not monitor profiles.

[Forseti]

Even Firefox can be made profile aware now. 

Really - how? Just been trying Firefox for a few days now but can't find this mentioned in any of the options.

[picsfor]

See - you learn some thing every day!
Now to learn how to afford a MacBook for Mrs B (when i'm not going away  )

[Jonathan]

Even Firefox can be made profile aware now. 

Really - how? Just been trying Firefox for a few days now but can't find this mentioned in any of the options.

Erm, OK, they tweaked it again....

v3 you had to hack the about file to make it colour aware - there was no obvious option.  v3.5 colour management is turned ON by defaul (and you have to hacka  config file to turn it off).

So if you're running 3.5 then 1998 images should now look correct.  Not that anybody posts 1998 images to the web because IE8 is still market dominator

[anglefire]

Doesn't LR use ProPhoto by default?

I must confess that I use sRGB . I only use ProPhoto when I take a very high ISO shot with the MkIII and want to remove some of the noise - I have an action that has specially profiles to do the best job it can. TBH I only have to use this if the ISO is at 6400 or above (I.e. Under exposed if above 6400) as most of the time I don't bother. But that going OT.

[Forseti]

@ Jonathan - thanks for the info. In fact I'm using Firefox v3.6

As to several other posts in this thread - I'm totally confused. I believed that I'd got all this colour space/colour profile nonsense clear in my head and then I read something else and it's all back to square one again. My understanding has always been that Lightroom, which is essentially a RAW rendering/editing application attaches (by default) a colour profile of ProPhoto AKA Melissa to imported RAW files. However, the working space Lightroom uses is the calibrated monitor icc profile. Rendered/edited RAW files (which don't have a colour profile at capture) can then be further edited in Photoshop as a TIFF etc with either this ProPhoto colour profile, ARGB or sRGB. But here's where confusion begins to creep in - in Photoshop preferences the user has the option of setting a working space (mine is set to sRGB) and everything that I've read on the Adobe forums specifically state that the monitor profile should NOT be used as the working space. So on the one hand we have LR using the monitor profile as it's working space whilst on the other, Photoshop is using a colour profile i.e. sRGB as it's working space irrespective of what colour profile has been attached to any image itself.

I am leaning more to the belief that ignorance is bliss, calibrate my monitor, set both external editing in LR and working space in PS to sRGB and let the applications themselves sort out all the internal mumbo jumbo.

By the way - we were at the receiving end of yet another mass dumping of snow during the night, power lines are down and I'm running an external generator. Time to go back to bed I think and set the alarm clock for June.  

[Jonathan]

And.....bre-a-t-h-e....

It's quite simple There are effectively 2 things referred to as a colour profile that have the same format but are used differently.  People often confuse them.

1. Photo colour SPACE.  E.g. sRGB, Adobe 1998, Melissa, ProPhoto.  Think of this as a set of colours or a box of paints.  A pixel in a picture might have colour "293" or "F3" or 255,255,243.  Until you know which box of paints you were using when you created the file you don't know exactly what colour it is (though it will be pretty similar).  So Crayola colour "7" might be a greeny yellow and Karen D'ache 7 might be yellowy green.  Raw files don't have a box of paintsassigned to them - but you need to assign one before you can view them.

2. A colour profile for an output device.  Think of this as an interference pattern.  Every time you display "blue" on the screen it comes out a bit greenish for example.  Your colour profile says "subtract this much green every time you display blue".  The monitor next to it has a reddish bias so its profile says "drop a bit of red from everything".

So what I really said at the top of this thread was "wow, the screen on my laptop conforms really well to the factory default - it's not too red or too green or too blue".  Which is kind of what you expect when you pay 2K for a laptop