chris_ma wrote: ↑Fri Jul 08, 2022 1:37 pm
Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else and it's likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather. You can make the situation better, though far from perfect, by carefully calibrating and stabilizing your equipment, your procedures, and your environment. This book discusses some tools and techniques that can help.
hi Rik,
while I can relate to some of the above and I suspect it was written tongue in cheek by the books author, I fundamentally disagree.
chris_ma, to clarify, what I wrote was that (boldface added)
rjlittlefield wrote: ↑Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:56 pm
Roughly summarizing my impressions, what the book's introduction really ought to say is something like (quoted block follows)
I can say for sure that the phrasing in the "quoted" block was tongue in cheek, because those words were written by me, not by the author of the book.
Regarding the content, I don't see much disagreement in what's been written.
In fact, if I had written a long description, and avoided tongue-in-cheek style, I would have written something very much like what you did.
So, what's been written? When I read your words (previous page,
HERE) what I see is that you've said monitors don't match prints, prints on different paper don't match each other, and the appearance of anything changes if you change the viewing environment. Then you've said that with sufficient investment in training, tools, and stabilizing the equipment and production environment, you can reliably control what gets produced, but once you release the product you have no assurance that what the viewer sees is what you intended them to. I also see that "with some experience and care, things can be matched to give the same impression. this is usually not possible by automated setting but has be done manually", and I totally agree with that.
Now, as a matter of style I grant that my wording "Color management is a mess" may be seen as too harsh. To be less caustic, while retaining a bit of tongue-in-cheek, I might have written "Color management is messy", in the same neutral-valued sense that many things are messy but controllable with some care. Or to go even farther toward graciousness, I might say that "color management is intrinsically complicated, and folks who are deeply immersed in the field are to be complimented for getting a good handle on the production process."
Still, we're all talking about the same set of facts, and I don't think we disagree about what those facts are.
Again to clarify, my comment about "likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather" was motivated by exactly the same point that you made: "if we work at a monitor in a bright room, and then continue to work at night in a dark room, the brightness, contrast and saturation will feel quite different because our eyes (and brain) are reacting to the environment."
To put this in a personal context, my own primary workspace is in a shared family room that has a large window, which my wife is adamant must be left uncovered during daylight hours. My normal workday spans from roughly 7:30 am to 11 pm (with copious breaks!), so during the span of a single day my monitors may be viewed in an environment that ranges from the blue of shade to the gray of clouds to a mix of cool & warm LED tubes.
I recognize that this is a wildly uncontrolled workspace. Most of my workspaces over the last 50 years have been. So for color balancing I have learned to rely mostly on histograms and gray references, and for other aspects I rely on head-to-head comparisons
on the same medium. I don't really care if the absolute color coming off my screen happens to be different from the rest of my environment, as long as what should be gray in my image has R=G=B in pixel values and visually matches the gray surround and standard images that I display on the same screen at the same time. Simultaneous head-to-head comparisons I mostly trust; all others not so much.
At this point, I've probably dropped enough hints to suggest that I do not expect my user experience or my image outputs to be much improved by having carefully calibrated monitors. But I could be wrong about that, and in any case the general topic of color management is interesting to learn more about. I look forward to continued discussion.
--Rik