by Eesh dewan
equal measure. The love arises from the incredible creative freedom that
comes with digital technology.
Thanks to image editing programs like Photoshop, any humble workstation can
now be upgraded at reasonable cost to a highly sophisticated photo lab. But
that's exactly where the problem lies and where the feelings of hate come
from. Previously, you would give the customer a slide on which the colors of
the image could be seen quite clearly with the naked eye. How a photo print
was produced from this slide remained a somewhat opaque process for most
creative types and was carried out by a printer's lithographic department.
Nowadays, for a few thousand rupees you can get a fully equipped workstation
that technically performs all the stages in the professional workflow from
image capture through to printing. Customers accordingly expect
photographers to work with true colors. This means on the one hand that
photographers must adjust and edit their pictures digitally, in order to
compensate for technical deficiencies. On the other hand, it means that
photographers must produce results that meet the expected standards not just
on their own screens. They must be able to produce finished prints that look
the same as on the monitor. Color-true proof prints have also become
popular. These not only show a full-quality version of the photo, but also
give a preview of what can be expected in the offset print. The technical
revolution has turned photographers not just into photo lab technicians but
into lithographers too. And many photographers have been defeated by these
requirements. Partly because they could not afford the ridiculously
expensive systems that purported to be the remedy, and partly because they
did not know how to properly use this technology which is as highly complex
as it is costly.
Relatively recently, professional systems like Spyder3Elite were introduced,
which with regular use promise on-screen color fidelity at the same price as
the better amateur solutions. They take over the complex process of
calibrating and creating ICC profiles almost completely automatically. If
you wish to or have specific requirements, you can of course intervene and
use the Help function to answer all your questions in detail; but you donít
have to. Calibrating the printer on the other hand is somewhat trickier. In
the very first step you have to linearize a device, i.e. keep the output as
color-neutral as possible. Usually, this is done well enough by the
manufacturers ICC profiles supplied with the printer. But unlike a monitor,
which always displays its colors on the same medium, printers work with
different kinds of paper. Different types are used for different purposes:
plastic-coated photo paper, matt art paper for fine art and even production
paper for simulating offset prints. Each medium accepts colors differently
and has specific properties for the printer and for the inks used that must
be taken into account in the color management. Custom ICC profiles The basic
principle of calibrating a printer goes like this: you print a measurement
chart to the device and then digitize it back again. A piece of software
uses the imported values to create a description of the combination of
printer, paper and ink properties: the profile. Anyone who needs
professional standards of accuracy in the profiling uses a
spectro-colorimeter such as Datacolor Spyder3Print. Depending on the quality
required, you can print and measure 150, 225 or up to 967 patches per
measurement chart. Thatís about as precise as you can get. This combination
of hardware and software is a fast and flexible solution when you want to
get back to your real work as quickly as possible: Photography.
In the beginning, photography is a passion and you are simply happy each
time a picture comes out right. But the more it gets you under its spell,
the more you wish for perfection. This applies to cameras and lenses as much
as to finished prints. Many experienced photographers have for instance
waited years before switching from analog to digital photography. What was
holding them back was not the initially high price. They were just as
horrified by the indifferent quality of the photographs. Now the technology
of digital photography has come so far that it no longer lags behind analog
35 mm photography.
However, many photographers are still struggling with new uncertainties. You
used to take a picture, take it along to the lab and get a print in return.
If the colors weren't right, you could complain. If that didn't work, in
principle you still had the option of having the photos corrected using an
expensive printing process in a specialist laboratory. Today the situation
is rather different. Once you've taken the shot, you can check it
immediately on the camera display. It then lands on the hard disk of your
computer as a file, where it is sorted, edited and stored, before ever being
made into a print. Once you are used to it, this process works rather well.
What doesn't work so well is the standard color display. Colors look
different on the camera display than on your screen, and different again
when printed.
Anyone who knows a bit about the subject also knows that in digital
photography you can't get by without calibrating your monitor. If the screen
has been calibrated to be color-neutral, you know that the colors are being
displayed reliably. However, monitor calibration is only part of the
solution. Correct screen colors cannot be equated with correct printer
colors. For how can the printer know what the monitor is displaying? A
color-true workflow therefore only works if the devices involved are
communicating with one another. And to record their individual deviations
from the ideal standard of the defined color spaces, we use so-called ICC
profiles. Over the years, these have become accepted as the standard and any
half-way decent operating system is able to integrate and use them. Creating
a color profile for your monitor is very easy with colorimeters such as
Spyder2 or Spyder3. However, you need to repeat the calibration regularly
every two to four weeks, as monitor colors are continually changing. Only
frequent recalibration will ensure color fidelity.
For the photographer on the other hand, calibrating the printer takes a bit
more time. With products such as Spyder3Print you can simply linearize any
inkjet printer and produce good results on standard photo paper. Calibration
involves printing out a test chart and reading the test printout using the
spectro. This is then analyzed by the software and converted into a profile.
If you work with different types of paper on a top-of-the-range photo
printer, you should choose a product like Datacolor Spyder3Print, which
allows you to create profiles for different sorts of paper. This may at
first seem a bit over the top, but there is a good reason for it. Just think
how differently an ink drop behaves on porous newspaper compared to
plastic-coated photo paper. When the ink drop falls on to photo paper, it
retains its shape and starts to dry. On the newspaper the drop grows into a
spot and the edges start to fray. Multiply this effect a thousand times and
then extend it to four, six or even eight colors merging into one another
and you get an idea of what happens on one square centimeter of print paper
and why even the tiniest differences in quality of the paper can have such a
dramatic effect on the color representation.
Shooting, editing, printing; it used to be that only professional
photographers could afford it, but now anyone can do all this at home on a
normal PC. Digital photography has become child's play, thanks to lenses
with lighting focus and automatic programs that can control any lighting
situation. Even post-editing on a PC becomes easier with each new generation
of software and provides ever more creative freedom.
The only thing that doesn't yet work too well is the correct reproduction of
colors. Pictures always look a bit different on screen that when you took
them. And different again when you print them. From a technical viewpoint,
this is hardly surprising: three different devices are working together,
none of which has been calibrated to the other. A camera chip performs the
digitalization in the RGB color space. This is the color space of light in
which the human eye breaks down the colors it sees into red, green and blue
elements, before our brain puts them back together again into a perceived
color. After downloading pictures on to a computer, we view them on a
monitor, which also displays colors using the RGB model. The small but
subtle difference is that the monitor cannot display as many shades of color
as the camera chip can capture. When you finally send the photo to the
printer, the light colors are converted into ink colors. In fact, the
printer doesn't expose the paper so much as cover it in drops of four, six,
eight or more ink colors. If you've ever tried to mix an exact color shade
using a paint box, you'll have a rough idea of how difficult it is to
convert RGB colors seen with the eye into material colors.
On a computer, this conversion is done using standard color tables, which is
why the results are so inaccurate. In order to achieve a uniform color
result, you need to network the three devices together. This is color
management's central task. It calibrates the devices to one another using
specific profiles. These profiles describe the particular features of each
device and come as standard with top-of-the-range cameras and printers. Any
half-way decent operating system will have the necessary infrastructure to
integrate these profiles. Cameras, scanners and printers work reasonably
consistently. Monitors on the other hand are subject to creeping wear and
tear. Which is why the color profiles they come with are only a guide and
need updating regularly. This is done using a ìcolorimeterî such as
Spyder2express. This is a measuring device that uses special software to
measure the monitorís color values and adjust any color faults or loss of
brightness.
Once the monitor is displaying the colors reliably, you can proceed to
calibrate the printer. If you integrated the relevant profiles, the color
output will often match the on-screen display. However, some printers either
don't have any profiles or they need to be calibrated afterwards; for
example if you are using high-quality fine-art photo print paper. For these
cases there is special software like Spyder3Print, which helps the image
editing application to convert RGB color images into the correct colors for
printing. Printer calibration is extremely simple. You simply print a
special test print and then read it back in. The software analyzes the
colors, saves a profile of them and you can then use this to print out other
pictures with the true colors. Compared to a few years ago, the price of
entry into color management has fallen dramatically. Today you can buy
colorimeters such as Spyder2express for a little over 7000 rupees.