Interesting discussion! I’d like to chime in from the POV of a video editor who, since having a kid, is spending more and more time capturing stills than getting to work on video editing.

I’ll start by admitting I’m not a colorist. I wish I was but I’m nowhere near the level that a true professional video colorist is. I have to rely heavily on scopes but more on my best guess :)

That being said, from a video POV, I can spend all day in an editing bay making the right cuts, transitions, etc in a film. I’m intentionally spend a lot of time on coloring as it really sets the tone, if you will, in a film. I know when I cut the film that the cut/edit will always be there, no matter what display the film is viewed on. However, it’s so frustrating to spend so much time coloring a piece only time find the device displaying my film is not calibrated properly. Perhaps I’ve brought up the red channel just a hair in post production to put a slight emphasis on something, but then I watch the film on my friend’s display and it looks as though the film is baked with the red channel, grrrrr! All that to say there came a point where I had to embrace the fact that I had zero control over the audiences display and that if peeps really wanted to see what I intended to put out there, they had a responsibility to get the device calibrated.

So, how in the world does that connect to what we’re talking about here? Well, in the video world I know that I have control only to a certain point, that point being what I burn onto a disc or what I upload. This same ideal holds true for the photography world as well when we’re talking about beaming out shots out to the interwebs. However, in the photography world I do have one more option for control over the way my final shot looks and that is if I print it myself. However, to be honest, what I thought would be great b/c of that one more control point has actually ended in frustration b/c I can’t seem to get what I have on my monitor to match what I print at home (on my admittedly old 6 year old Canon Pixma) or what I send to somewhere like Apple via Aperture for a photobook. So, I’d argue for calibration of monitor and printer (as I still can’t get this to match up right from my 27’ iMac :(

But even with all that said, the environment in which my picture is being viewed can totally screw the way the colors translate to the eye. So even with that one more control point in printing the picture, the color that bounces all around the environment that we’re viewing the picture in can change the way we see certain colorations. So even the “perfectly” calibrated monitor/printer at some point will yield to the environment, in the same way a video yields to the device which is displaying the film.

So I guess what I’ve learned form the video world I take with me to the stills world, calibrate the best I can but at a certain point I have to let go and realize it’s never going to be perfect. :)

PS, I’m still looking for the best device to get my monitor and printer calibrated. My prints seem to come out darker (no matter where they are being printed from) than what I see on the screen.

Dustin,

you have understood everything.

FWIW …

You come from video, but think about film. In the days when directors were gods and film was art, they had an impressive amount of control over how their ‘oeuvres’ were viewed. Imagine this … Kubrick used to visit theatres, in person, himself, to ensure that the projection was good. That included of course, the quality of the colour. Those guys could control the prints (on film) made for projection and it cost a fortune. Once it got to TV, sitting rooms, sofas and PC monitors, everyone has their own idea of what ‘looks nice’ … except for the people that care. Those people calibrate their monitors. It’s like a secret club. :)

To get prints that are WYSIWYG i.e. not too dark. (Unbelievable that this is still going on after what? 15 years of inkjet printing?) … here’s how :

Calibrate your monitor with a good device.
Calibrate you printer with a good device.

Pay only cursory attention to ‘brightness’ in your monitor calibration. How can your device/monitor know what your environment is? Answer … even with the Gretag Spectro … it can’t.

Have a middle brightness room for working on your monitor. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their working environment for photos should be a darkroom. It should not. It’s good to have darkness *behind* you so that the monitor is not reflecting ambient light, but darkrooms were for processing light sensitive material. Computers aren’t light sensitive.

Place a sheet of white paper, next to your calibrated monitor, in an area where it is evenly lit by the ambient light.

Open an empty Finder folder on your Mac and drag its window to fill the screen. You should now have a white screen.

Adjust your monitor’s brightness, until it matches the brightness of your sheet of white paper. This is now your white.

Leave your sheet of white paper next to your monitor and if during the day, or night, your ambient light changes, *adjust your monitor accordingly*! Nothing is set in stone. Light changes. (Unless you have a pro suite, in which case, skip the changing light thing … but don’t skip the white paper.)

Open the image you want to print.

Adjust the canvas/area/surround when editing the image, in whatever imaging software you’re using, so that you have some white area around the image. Say … 2 or 3 cm.

Perform your image adjustments in this environment. Note : that the white of your image matches the white of the sheet of paper next to your monitor.

Print your image.

Say thank you.

:) :)

David,

all of the colour manipulation is at the OS level. Adobe have their own ‘engine’ but it all hooks into ImageCore, as far as I know (though don’t quote me).

To be honest, there have been more bugs in ColorSync than in a Pixar movie. Anyone working with a Mac portable and an external monitor over the years, would know that Apple left an infuriating bug in there for about 7 years : Plug in the external monitor to an already running portable and *usually* it used the wrong profile You had to restart your portable with the monitor already plugged to get the correct profile. Talk about a pitfall.

Anyway … that FINALLY got fixed (mostly) in 10.7 and may be more solid still in as yet unseen versions of the OS. ;) Anyway … in true Apple tradition it’s now pretty cool. Slide your image across monitors and the profile updates live and … if you get it just right … you can have one half correctly profiled on one monitor and the other half correctly profiled on the other monitor. :)

The reason you can export the Master without a problem, is because Aperture never does anything to a Master. Thankfully, they got that bit right from the start.

Thanks for the reply and tips! Now to find a good calibrator

Apple support emailed me so I ftp my system info and the sample files of the color problem. Ill let you know if they get back to me again. Someone there is looking at it! YEA!!!!!!

Joseph,

I’m not going to flame you. But I couldn’t disagree with you more on this issue. While I can agree that our perception of color can differ, if your finished goal is to be accurate, it takes an investment in time effort and finances to get there. For me it is more than worth the investment.

Granted, every photographer has their own set of needs when it comes to color accuracy. If it were up to me and I was only creating images for my own pleasure and I were printing using only one source for a single presentation medium I wouldn’t need Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop or any other image editing program or even shoot RAW for that matter … I would simply take my camera card of jpegs to the Costco and have them print the images … and use THEIR color managed workflow.

Unfortunately, my photography is extremely important to my livelihood. It is because my clients set certain standards which I must meet or I don’t get to eat this week, or pay studio rent, or a car payment, or a mortgage, or have money to buy all these neat cameras , computers and software to get the job done … so having a carefully planned color managed workflow isn’t some tedious task … it’s necessary to earning a living.

Color management is far more than making sure all your whites and blacks are neutral, there are vast differences and tendencies between camera sensors, the firmware used in-camera and how your software of choice renders same. You need to be absolutely sure that what you are seeing on the screen, both from the image and the numbers of the histo are actually what the data represents and that the software of choice is not misrepresenting same.

In the course of a month I may have jobs that cross the span of 8-10 different output formats … from web use, newspaper, magazine, annual reports to standard color prints and canvas wraps and press printed albums/books for weddings and portraiture. Thats a lot of variance and quite often, I don’t have the luxury to hand off the color management to the end user or vendor. My clients pay me for a professional service and I don’t think it is asking too much to give them what they are paying for. For if I am going to expect my labs to do all the technical stuff … why do my clients need me? They can just shoot it and take it to Costco themselves.

You can have neutral, neutrals in an image, but if somebody is paying you several hundred dollars per hour to shoot their wares for custom CMYK glossy brochures for their sales staff to offer their clients, that shade of “Rusty Rose Red” or “Emerald Isle Green” better come off the presses damn close to what the original was … or you won’t see any repeat business … It matters little what Apple, Adobe, Phase One or any other software developer thinks the colors rendered by my camera of choice … by having the ability to create a custom camera profile and confidence that your software can cooperate with that profile, as part of a complete color managed system, I can ensure my clients will indeed receive that which they are paying me for and not an inaccurate interpretation created by a third party who has never met either of us.

So while I don’t condemn your point of view … I hope you can see why others may not have your same level of desire for the use of custom camera profiles.

Great discussion..probably needs another thread. My need for color management is a mixture of Bruce and Joseph. I hand files to Magazines and clients with their understanding that I have made the white balance, tonal range etc on their images in accordance to what I want with their needs in mind. I know they are going to hand off those files to cmyk web presses and to their on website admin. I therefore need a profile attached to that image so that it can be respected by other users. If my mother or someone on the internet is looking at my images and they don’t see what I see because they haven’t calibrated or have ignored my profile…well I don’t care about them. I think we all agree that this bug in AP3/Lion is menacing because the AP is suppose to use or honor the imbedded profile to describe the colors to the monitor and other users. But it seems its converting the tifs to totally different profiles spaces. I need profiles honored by all software that is capable of honoring what I think it looks like. On the other hand my clients will change the WB, tonal range contrast sharpness etc for their needs and I don’t care about that either. I care that I gave them a standard that if they honor my profile they will see what I wanted them to start with. Ive given up on printing my work… everything is digital, Im out of wall space, and Inks dry out too quickly. I kinda think we are all not far off in our thinking. Cheers DAvid

Over the years I have aspired to be like Butch when it comes to color calibration. I had an X-Rite thing that I would suction to my display and tie up my computer for a half hour calibrating.

As displays have evolved I have come the conclusion, that I don’t really need to calibrate. I send my photos to wide variety of outputs, just like Butch, and not one client has ever asked about my monitor calibration.

I think the reason for that is they adjust the images for their own purposes on their own calibrated equipment. How can I calibrate my displays for my newspaper press, the occasional magazine client, or even more complicated, for the web?

The final output at my newspaper is looked at on a calibrated CRT display that’s probably over 10 years old. I couldn’t make my brand new MBP display look that bad even if I tried. However, the photos in the paper will look very much like they look on that display.

As for prints, I’m in the same boat as Joseph. My old Canon printer is toast. The only printer I have now is all-in-one HP I bought at Office Depot. It actually makes really nicely matched prints with out doing any calibration.

I’m sure that Butch is doing it right way. But, I just came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the great effort for me. I mean, even after I calibrated, the difference between what I saw before calibration was very very subtle. As I recall it made photos look slightly warmer.

On the other hand there are certainly situations where it’s absolutely essential to the workflow:

Every year I have a big multiple day assignment for a multinational corporate client that’s based in Oregon. It involves five photographers shooting roughly 4000 images each per day for five days. Each photographer has their own digital tech who works on images for immediate upload to the web and then for movement to their digital archive. The photos are used in huge billboard sized prints, life size displays and digital slideshow productions projected the size of movie theater. Each of those digital techs uses the same NEC calibrated display. These techs do this thing every single day all over the world for a variety of photographers. They are supremely knowledgeable about this topic.

This is would be the one situation where calibration is a must. So, when calibration really counts, my digital tech handles it for me. I see my workflow as just the initial step in the life of an image. If I sent final images to a client, they are almost always reworked to fit the clients specific workflow.

We are all using colour management, whether you realise it or not. It has come a long way since I had to learn about it and is so straightforward now, that you can ‘almost’ get away without doing anything. All you really need to do, is calibrate your display. Modern Apple displays are very consistent (which was not the case just a few years ago) and are delivered with a fairly good default profile. It is slightly ‘blue’ though.

All your images from your camera come into your Mac with a profile attached. Your display reads this profile (via the OS) and using the profile you’ve chosen for your monitor in your Display prefs, it ‘maps’ the colours in your images, so that they can be viewed on your Monitor in as accurate a way as possible. Send these images to a client and the same process happens at their end, where their OS maps the image colours to their display. This way, we’re all on the same page.

If you don’t calibrate your monitor, then all the way down the line, everything else will be out of whack. Your monitor is how you *see* what you’ve got. Even your camera’s screen has a profile and is colour managed. So spending time in Aperture or whatever and making your images ‘pretty’, tweaking colour, is pointless, if everyone you send them to see’s them as overly blue, for example. In fact, try removing the profile from an image, change your monitor profile to ColorMatch and see how your image looks. Your OS will apply your monitor’s profile to images without one. ColorMatch is gamma 1.8, which is what is used for most repro. Your sRGB 2.2 gamma image will look as flat as a pancake and if you send it to a repro house, where they’re running 1.8 gamma, they will tell your client that your images are crap and unusable. Even if they took it upon themselves to ‘guess’ what profile you were working with, they would only be guessing and the beautiful evening sunshine you were so pleased with, might still be way off in contrast/colour.

But you don’t have to go this far to see how important colour management is … just open a Flash based site on a wide-gamut monitor and it’ll look like shit … because Adobe have never produced a useable, colour managed version of Flash. Colours of sRGB images will be massively over-saturated and you’ll think … nice pictures but wow! This guy likes seriously garish colours and if it’s a client (who probably doesn’t even know what a wide-gamut monitor is … but has one anyway) then you probably won’t get the job.

Colour management isn’t about printers. It’s about anywhere you look at images. That might be an iPhone, a MacBook, a wide-gamut monitor, in a book, on tv, or … yes, a print you, or your printer/bureau, produces for hanging on a wall. Today colour management is so easy, it’s absurd to deliberately ignore it. You used to have to tell clients to ensure that colour management was turned on in PS on their Macs, where they were probably running in CMYK and spending their time trying to ‘fix’ your images. Now, they don’t even know colour management exists .. but nevertheless, it is running in the background, doing its job. All you have to do today, to join the party, is calibrate your monitor (and your printer, if you have one, although some of the canned profiles these days are excellent and some printers have built-in spectros for self calibration and linearization).

Joseph,

certainly, if you only ever expect your images to be viewed on the web, then there is an argument for not calibrating … except that not everyone is using the same monitor, or even the same type of monitor. So if it’s going to be wild, why not just try and at least put some people on the same page, by calibrating your own monitor? Seems like a small step. I don’t recommend doing it manually with Apple’s Display prefs though. It’s a lottery. I would also point out that older ‘pucks’, 2-3 years or so, can vary a LOT in their quality (I did some work with HP on their high-end monitors and this is one of the nasty little secrets we stumbled across). Also, some pucks are just not really able to calibrate an LCD correctly, so you need a recent one.

But really, the arguments against calibrating are pretty weak, because doing it just once on an LCD is going to keep you in fair shape for years (LCD hardly move at all) and anyone viewing, even via IE these days, will see, within the capabilities of their own particular monitor, pretty much what you’re seeing. What’s not to like? Also … Ad agencies, and Design groups etc., all have calibrated setups. But not least … when you go to the print shop, they won’t have to ‘tweak’ your images because they’ll just come out as you wanted them (within the capabilities of the printer … which these days on the best ones, is even wider than AdobeRGB at the green end.)

I totally agree with gfsymon on this matter … I don’t trust anyone with my files once I have processed them … why go to all the effort to buy and learn to use software to adjust, tone, color correct, enhance and apply artistic nuances to an image if you are going to let a middleman tweak it for you so it reproduces properly? Seems to defeat the whole purpose of creativity.

Think of color profiles as interpreters … your camera speaks Spanish … your monitor speaks English … your printer or lab speaks French … Don’t you think there would be far less confusion if they all spoke a common language with very accurate translations? That’s the whole reason for custom profiling all your devices.

I use three photo labs and four book/album printing vendors. None of them adjust my images whatsoever. Ever.

By using a fully managed color profile system, not just for the monitor, but also for my cameras, printers and soft proofing profiles for my labs and vendors, I KNOW what the finished product is going to look like before I even upload the files.

Heck, profiling a monitor is child’s play these days. It takes no longer than the time to enjoy a good cup of coffee … and the results are impressive if you haven’t done so recently. I only profile my monitors every other month or so … because even with LCD monitors, the backlight does fade and change color temperature over time, not nearly to the degree that CRT did, but over time, it is noticeable.

However, the more important reason to profile your monitor is, by default, most all LCD monitors are far too bright out of the box for processing images for print. If you ever have problems with dark prints, though they look fine on the monitor, the fault is likely with your monitor, not your printer. Keep in mind, with iMacs and Apple laptops, there is only a brightness control for the monitor, simply reducing the brightness won’t help because you also have to bring the overall contrast and dynamic range of the monitor to normal ranges as well. Both can be adversely affected by only adjusting brightness … this is where a proper custom profile can make a huge difference.

Great question Fred - the short answer is no; however, I asked myself a more fundamental question: is ColorChecker Passport needed when using Aperture?

Based on my tests, the answer is no, it is not needed.

I’m testing the viability of migrating from LR3 to Aperture and this was one of my initial hurdles. I’ve seen how colors shift noticeably, particularly deep blues, in LR3 when I switch between Adobe Standard (the default) and the custom camera profile created by ColorChecker Passport. So I ran a simple test.

In a controlled (dark) studio environment using strobes and a calibrated light meter, I captured a RAW image of the Passport and imported it into LR3. I took a screen shot of the Passport and labeled it LR3 Original. I then ran the ColorChecker Passport software to generate a custom camera profile. After relaunching LR3 to pick up the new profile, I applied the new profile and took a 2nd screen shot labeled LR3 Custom.

I took the same RAW file from my test and imported it into Aperture. I took a screen shot, labeling it Aperture. I then opened all three screen shot images in Photoshop and sampled the dark blue swatch (which is where I noticed the most significant color shift in Lightroom)

Below is the result of color sampling: (R G B values)

LR3 Original 0,91,184
LR3 Custom 0,60,181
Aperture 0,64,178

Notice the significant shift in the Green value between the LR3 Original and Custom images. Also notice how closely the Aperture sample matches the LR3 Custom. I also spot checked several other color swatches where I noticed an apparent color shift in LR3 between the default and custom setting. In all cases, the Aperture result closely matched the LR3 custom profile result.

As a result, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need ColorChecker Passport for Aperture. I’ve love to hear other’s comments as well.

Doug, Joseph,

you might want to hold fire on any conclusions you’re drawing here. :)

Aperture 3 has a massive colorsync bug in it. I’ve reported it 3 times, but I’m bored doing that now, as there’s no feedback. 3.2.2 update gave me hope from the bug-fix read-me, but no … I think they fixed something related but missed the important one.

I started a thread on Apple Discussions about it in 07/2011 and it was confirmed by a couple of users … but colorsync is beyond the ken of most amateurs, so it didn’t surprise me that it didn’t cause a stir. I just hoped that Apple might pick up on it. I’d already confirmed it with a colleague anyway. Actually he’s a friend I’ve worked with in the past on his beta testing HP’s LF printers (z3100 and z3200).

Rather than going through it all again … perhaps you might just read through the thread. It’s not too long. The test file and screen grabs are still on my iDisk (not for much longer!)

Apple Support-Discussion

If you have any influence with the Aperture engineers Joseph … this would be a good one to get fixed.

Oh yeh … if you have Aperture 2.x on a Mac anywhere, it’s easy to confirm that it doesn’t suffer the same bug.

Oops!

the link I posted was half way down the thread. This is my original post

Joseph, I get very frustrated with color profile and companies that change things from one version to another. Colorsync / Apple are not alone Adobe PS has their own issues.

I confirmed that an adobe98 image with a fill color of 72 182 70 gets hosed when imported to AP3 . I also would luv to have you confirm this for me. Taking that same image convert it from adobe98 to SRGB. You should not see a large visual difference between the two if “converting”, now import that srgb into AP3. My new import in AP looks like the Adobe98 image in PS, even though I converted it to srgb. Let me know what you get and then we’ll talk about what is happening….I think.

David,

My new import in AP looks like the Adobe98 image in PS, even though I converted it to srgb.

I ran many many tests on this, when I stumbled upon it last year. I spent almost a day on it, going back and forwards, different Macs, different MacOS’s (10.5/10.6/10.7(beta)).

When I compare the file imported into Aperture in sRGB and open in PS in AdobeRGB, they are quite different.

BUT !! You need a wide-gamut display to see the difference clearly. An Apple monitor isn’t capable of really showing the difference clearly. For example, when I view them on my MacBook Pro, they look identical. Use the dropper in PS and you’ll see that they are not however. I have a wide-gamut monitor (full AdobeRGB) which really shows these differences at the green end. HUGE difference. Also note … these differences are almost as huge on a high-end inkjet.

This is an extremely serious bug, because it causes ‘data loss’. These are the ones that should be top of the heap for Apple to fix. Of course, I don’t suppose there are many people outside the Pro community using Tiffs in Aperture, so the large part of the user base is unaffected. But those Pros that are importing Tiffs are all, almost certainly, using AdobeRGB or ProPhoto. Ouch!

My own feeling, is something is happening with CMYK preview. The green image, when imported into Aperture in AdobeRGB is remarkably similar to Web-Coated Fogra28

Gfsymon This gets very confusing quickly when trying to test options. MAJOR BUG. And isn’t The color engine in AP3 a Colorsync product? How can Apple allow this to go on since 3.0, over a year???? The only thing I can do now is export images as Master which seem to keep the color. Not just tifs but importing a jpg adobe98 also got hosed.

Better be fixed in 4.0 or Ill be sick.

You’d think the guys in the Colorsync dept. would be all over this.

The driving force behind the Colorchecker Passport is the ability (with the accompanying software) to create custom Camera Calibration profiles for use in Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom … unfortunately, Aperture can’t take advantage of these profiles.

Of course you can always use the color target charts as White Balance reference in Aperture, and/or use the targets as a base for color readout when manually adjusting color in Aperture … but the whole purpose of the PP system is to easily create custom profiles for pretty much any camera and lighting condition … until Aperture can adapt or make use of such a feature … the “ease” of use portion will remain a major missing factor …

Though you could always click the “Provide Aperture Feedback” in the application and request support for the Passport Colorchecker system …