John N wrote:
We had a similar talk this past week as well. As I understood there is an industry 'standard' that cameras and printers etc. adhere to. Monitors do too, but as the light changes in the room your monitor is in so does your view - unless you are fortunate enough to have a room which you can black out and keep a consistent light level available in. I don't. Might get around to a calibrator one day.
If you're REALLY picky, here's the formula for lab-quality print viewing:
A room with indirect, diffused, very low level lighting of 91 CRI, 5000°K, and barely enough brightness to read papers in front of you.
All walls, tables, and other surfaces painted Munsell N8 gray
(a neutral viewing standard in the photo industry).
Medium-dark gray background on your computer desktop NO desktop images.
Print viewing box next to the monitor, with even, 5000°K, 91 CRI illuminant. The inside of the box should be painted Munsell N8 gray. Light level at the viewing surface should be around 105 cd/m^2
Monitor capable of displaying 98% or more of the Adobe RGB color space
Monitor calibrated with a color temperature of 6500°K, a black point of 0.5 cd/m^2, a white point of 105 cd/m^2, and a gamma between 2.0 and 2.2, arrived at through test print comparisons for your particular paper of greatest use.
Operators must dark-adapt to the environment before adjusting images. This can take 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the brightness of the previous environment.
Operators should not be pregnant, nursing, tired, overly-caffeinated, stressed, sick, or using common cold remedies. (No marijuana or illegal drugs, either!)
Operators should be tested with the Munsell color test:
http://www.colormunki.com/game/huetest_kiosk...to determine their degree of accuracy in evaluating color. Color blind people should not adjust color images! A score of zero is perfect; acceptable is under 25.
Profiles installed for all the printers and substrates in use. These are to be used as PROOFING or PRINTER SIMULATION profiles when adjusting color for specific output devices.
We ran this way at the lab where I used to work. Incoming work was about 2.5 million 100% sRGB, 100% JPEGs per year. Output was primarily to Noritsu 31Pro mini-labs, with a Durst Theta 76, and some Epson inkjet (9600, 9880) printers, a NexPress, and some Konica Minolta electrostatic printers thrown in for good measure.
All our monitors in the color correction area were calibrated to exactly the same aims, on the same day, once a month. There was a "master" monitor and a "master" printer, and all comparisons were made to those specific devices.
Was it ever perfect? No. Was it really good? YES. We knew when we viewed an image that it would be very close, on paper, to what we were seeing on our monitors.