NVMUG eNews 11/19/2005
Last updated 11/20/2006
Calibrating a LCD Monitor and Much More
Warren Walker demonstrated calibrating an LCD monitor using a Spider. There was an interesting discussion about how to begin to set up a photographic web page to sell museum quality prints - maybe you can help. Four new books were added to the NVMUG library.
1. Selling Museum Quality Prints - Meeting Discussion
Dee Red Trees brought questions to the meeting from Plainfield. She has been a photographer for 40 years and has a competitive body of work. Count Basie said he could hear her music in an image she took of him. She can no longer handle a heavy camera and needs to make a living now. She would like to set up a photography web site to generate some income sell professional museum quality prints. Her images are mostly black and white professionally processed prints and some color slides. - mostly black and white. She asked questions about security, so her work would not be stolen, and about how to get started.
Dee has two G3 Macintosh laptops built in 2000 with OS 9.1 She is using one to do some mail and some searching. Goef checked one of the laptops, and found that it could run Mac OS X Panther or even Tiger, but she might need a card with Firewire and USB 2 ports, or more memory, or an external hard drive. Warren said he believed the machine was adequate to run Photoshop.
Members recommended that she upgrade to Mac OS X, either Panther or Tiger, because it will be easier to learn than to first learn OS 9 and then make the change to Mac OS X later. They also said she would be ahead getting a reconditioned eMac or iMac for the photography and web work than to pay to upgrade her laptops. She could still use her laptops for the kinds of things she is now doing.
Dee has been seeking tutoring. Neil suggested that she contact people at Lyndon State College to see if they might be able to help or have a student who might live closer to her and who would help. Steve Steinhour gave her a name at LSC to contact. Geof will see if Vermont Learning Institute, which is closer in Montpelier, might be able to provide some help.
Dee would need a scanner and a printer. Richard has both a 35 mm scanner and a flatbed print scanner that Dee could use to try. He gave Dee instructions to get to their picture and frame shop, which is not easy to find. Warren said that an $800 Epson inkjet printer with 3-black shades can produce exhibition quality prints that will last for 200 years. You could not do this two years ago.
Most scanners and printers can handle 8.5 x 11 or 8.5 x 14 inch paper, but, when she can she will need 14 x 17 or 20 x 24 as a minimum.
Dee will want to learn to use Photoshop for those things she wants to do, but it may be better to learn only those things she needs to do for her task than to take a course in Photoshop. Ansel Adams spent more time in the darkroom than in the field. Richard said that today photographers are using Photoshop as their darkroom to do color processing that could only be done in black and white in a chemical darkroom.
Steve Steinhour has been printing offset quality books for 30 years. In the last three years he has been printing up to 46 inch wide museum reproductions of images for photographers. Steve has a drum scanner with up to 6000 dpi resolution, and a digital Lica S1 camera, the equivalent of 26 megapixels, to capture equal quality images.
(After the meeting he showed us some of the black and white prints, including a book and silver print that sells for $2,500. He carries them to show what he can do for established artists.)
Dee, Richard and Warren looking at a print as Steve selects another one.
If I remember correctly, I did not take notes, Hartley recommended that Dee follow up on Richard's offer to see what she can do using his scanner and printer, seek help from a tutor or someone with experience that can help her learn and get the equipment she needs when she can, and talk to an expert printer like Steve that she can trust to see what the expert recommends.
I did not, however, remember to suggest to Dee that borrowing one of the Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One books from the NVMUG library would be a very good way to learn to do those things she really needs to use Photoshop for. See the Photoshop One-on-One reviews in the Reviews section.
2.Calibrating a Monitor
Warren Walker demonstrated calibrating a LCD monitor using a Spider and the Spider 2 Pro Studio Version software that came with it.
First he used the software that came with the Spider to set the brightness, setting the highest white lumens and then adjusting the next whitest area so that he could barely discern the difference. Then he set the contrast, setting the blacks so he could just distinguish the difference between the blackest and next black areas. Most CRTs give you a slider to adjust the color temperature, but the LCD only had adjustments for warm, cool, and normal. He set it to normal, which is 65K.
The Spider, which rather looks like one, has suction cups to hold it to the screen of a CRT monitor, but that might damage a LCD monitor. There is a cover to protect a LCD screen, and a counter weight that can be hung behind to hold the spider in place in front of the LCD screen for the roughly 20 minutes that the calibration takes.
Warren about to hang the Spider on the screen
The Spider, or its program, sends a table of numbers to the computer to display the color the numbers represent, then it reads the color displayed on the monitor as numbers.
The Spider on the screen surrounded by the color it is using.
Digital color is all numbers which do not mean anything when taken out of context. Most monitors have a color look up table to say how the colors will display on the screen. The Spider reads the colors, and knows what colors are being sent to the screen. It then adjusts the color table so the colors generated on the screen are the same as the colors going in.
You want to match the color values coming from the printer to the colors on the screen and the colors from the scanner and/or digital camera. The software has to use some kind of color space for each. Most digital cameras use a standard SRGB table. Warren said that they try to generate a generic color defined for a high definition TV, but even a high definition TV changes color as it ages.
The starting point for all this matching is to calibrate the monitor so it displays the colors that are being sent to it. Some people recalibrate every day. Warren recalibrates every month when out taking photos in the summer, and less often when processing less in the winter.
The Spider 2 Pro Studio Version with the software was about $200. It included software that allows you to edit the printer profile - a profile of how the Epson printer driver produces the color. Every Epson 1280 printer uses the exact same profile, but it is possible that sending the same image to two different printers would produce noticeably different colors. Warren has not actually used the software to edit his printer profile yet.
Steve Steinhour said that every paper and ink combination has a different profile.
Warren showed us the results he got before and after calibrating his monitor last night. There was a big difference. The original looked washed out by comparison.
The device can still be spooked by ambient light and surrounding color, but your eye gets even more spooked.
Perfection in color matching may be impossible.
Printer color output and monitor color are two different kinds of color, and can not match.
I know there is a blue flower that comes out either violet or white every time I take its picture, but I do not know why.
A number may be an exact value, but still may not be the right color. A color calibrated monitor may help. The ultimate objective is to get a number that pleases you.
Thanks to Warren and his Spider for a very interesting demonstration.
