Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
process control and understanding of color management will permeate
the industry and improve results overall.
The best thing about using color management is the ability to see
very accurate soft proofs of output; that is, the monitor-to-print match.
Most vendors of monitor calibration and profiling software don't seem
to understand how important ambient lighting, critical print lighting,
and screen surround colors are in soft proofing, so most instructions
for setting up soft proofing fall short and make side-by-side, screen-
to-print matches less accurate than one would like. This is perhaps
the third biggest problem for most people, after the overall complexity
of color management and inadequate gamut mapping in printer
profiles.
For example, to make a monitor work as a faux piece of paper, it's
necessary to keep the light on your side of the screen very dim, to min-
imize surface reflections. It's also necessary to have light behind the
monitor and around it in your field of view, so that it doesn't look like
a print in a black room with a spotlight on it, which warps our percep-
tion of image tonality. And the light shining around and behind the
display should be of almost exactly the same color as the white light of
the monitor. To match a print side-by-side with the soft proof requires
that the paper's white look exactly like the screen white, and you can't
get this by just calibrating to D50 or D65 with an instrument—you need
to tweak the display's white point by hand to match, and then calibrate
to that white point. This is one of the reasons I don't like LCD displays
with fluorescent backlights; that is, nearly all of them. Their white can
only be adjusted in software. LED-backlit LCDs will begin to appear late
this year, 2004, and will address this problem. The OLED displays that
should start to appear in 2006 will be much better than any LCD, at least
once the bugs are worked out. Finally, to see a soft proof and have any
hope of judging its overall lightness correctly, you must have two inches
or so of white around the image on screen. In Photoshop, set the fore-
ground color to white. Press the F key once to switch into the second of
the three display modes, the one with pale gray around the image. Select
the paint bucket tool (under the gradient tool). Hold down the Shift key
and click in the gray margin. Voilà. All your images in this second display
mode will now have white around them instead of pale gray. To switch
back, set the foreground color to (192, 192, 192) and repeat the Shift-
click business.
It's still a wild and wooly world for interoperability of devices under
different people's control, so when you send files around, getting them
to look the way they should is still somewhat unlikely, but the tools are
available to make a global community of great color possible, thanks to
the ICC standards and lots of software development. Over time it will get
a little easier, but I don't expect it to get a lot easier. Black & white will
improve quite a bit, as it hurries to catch up with color. Photographers
will struggle to learn. Software will get slicker and smarter. Photographers
