Genuine Lacie
2006
US $16.95
How To Be Certain The Color You Are Picking On Your Computer Is The Genuine Colour
Graphic designers, photographers, videographers, publishers and computer users at large: all of them depend on their digital equipment being capable of rendering colors right. But the sad truth is your colors will differ depending on the output device. A monitor's red is not the same as an inkjet printer's red. Besides, what is "red"?
Here are 10 things you can do to make sure red is red, whichever device has to render it.
1. Purchase a good monitor. OK, this is an open door, but by "good" i mean a monitor you can calibrate. That rules out all the office monitors, the Apple Theatres and leaves you with LaCie 300 range and Eizo ColorEdge products.
2. Get a good calibration and profiling application. You can get software that comes with a fine quality GretagMacbeth Display 2 colorimeter (called the "Squid 2" by Colour Solutions), and has a feature called "software calibration". The second calibrates any monitor by storing the calibration data (the Tone Response Curve) in the video card's look up tables. The sole requirement: your video card should support it. ATI's Radeon range supports this.
3. Calibrate and create a color profile for your monitor once a month. Calibration is different from profiling. Calibration means the colour look bup tables in the monitor are put into a known state, while a profile just describes the monitor's perception of colours. With calibration you tell the monitor that it must render "pure red" by setting its colour channels in a certain manner. The profile you create will tell your image modifying software, or graphic design application that pure red for this monitor means a specific mixture of its color channels.
4. Buy an inkjet printer that has non-clogging print heads. Ideally, print heads should not block. If they do, you can rest assured your colours will come out horrible. If they don't, you can still have bad colors, but now at the very least you can something about it. Good printers are more expensive than the bottom-price inkjet printers you can buy nowadays. Think about paying something similar to 200 Dollars at a minimum. For first-class printers like the HP Photosmart Pro B9180, expect to pay 700 Dollars.
5. Drive your inkjet through a Raster Image Processor. Many top of the range printers support a RIP, though not all RIPs are born equal. EFI makes good RIPs, as do the vendors that develop dearer RIPs for large format printers. EFI has a reasonable RIP, with support for ink limiting, black start setting, etc, for a particularly decent cost. It's the EFI Designer Edition.
6. Profile your printer and use that profile with your RIP to get correct colours, and save cash on ink consumption. Through the profile settings, you can determine how much ink gets sprayed onto the page. For some paper types, you can save a large amount of cash by setting ink limiting to it's optimum level for your printer.
7. Use established hardware such as X-Rite/GretagMacbeth or Barbieri to generate your CMYK printer profile. You should create a profile for each paper not supported by your printer manufacturer. If you've got to use your printer in RGB mode, you can do with less expensive profiling systems. The simplest way to guarantee a top quality profile is created when you do not have the budget to get a system that costs a couple of thousand bucks, is to make an appeal to a remote service such as Thinck.com's.
8. Use an image editing application such as Photoshop, which has a "softproof" feature. To softproof means that you'll be able to visually define an image's colors on-screen with enough precision to be confident the colors will match the made public output. Softproofing is rarely one-on-one, but can come extremely close, and is an alternate way of saving money by saving on both wasted paper and ink.
8. When revising your image, set the grey balance first. Select a neutral gray area in your image (if you took a photo, you'll remember what was grey, and if you do not, there are virtually always objects that really must be grey) and set this area as your neutral gray tone. In Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you do this by choosing the Levels or Curves tool, choosing the grey eye dropper in the dialogue window, and clicking with this specific tool in the neutral area of your image.
9. If your image has a warm tone to it, e.g. As it was shot at dusk or with tungsten light and no flash, you can neutralize color casts rather by selecting an area that is not exactly neutral but more toward the warm tone of the image. So long as the area is greyish fundamentally, the image will adjust. In an appropriate way.
10. Take care with setting Saturation levels too high. If you boost saturation, you are also boosting colour mistakes. You can boost the saturation of your image when you're sure it is colour-accurate.
These and lots more tips, tricks, and help files, but also product reviews and in-depth technology and strategy background information is available on IT-Enquirer.com. IT-Enquirer is a web mag directed at creative pros. It contains articles for noobs all of the way up to specialists in the field.
Check out some examples of great wedding videography here. This article has been syndicated by SEO CITY.
LaCie Sponsorship Video
