[Alcazar]

Hi everyone,
i have a cheap (200$) Dell monitor and i rented out a X-Rite ColorMunki to calibrate my screen.
I don't own a printer, my hope was just that
- the colours on my screen would be closer to some industry standard so that fotos looked closer on other people's screens to how they looked on mine
- and maybe better seperation between colours so that i can nail it when trying to get good skin colours in post processing

well, the results are a mixed bag:
- yes, i get different skin tones. the difference between the greenish and the pinkish shades of skin colour are much more apparent... but it looks somewhat weird. i initially thought i'd have to redo all my previous editing of my portraits
- the screen looks just a little bit turquoise (compared to the daylight coming in my windows), especially in the lightest tones
- everything on this screen looks a little crappy now. some movies i watch have some baaaad colours
- the colormunki took a luminance reading of my room and set the brightness of the screen accordingly, the result was _very_ dark - it would set the screen to a brightness of 18 out of 100 max. i decided i cared about colours but not so much about brightness accuracy anyway , so i bypassed that function and set the colormunki to a fixed value of 120, and that turned out fine.

well... has anyone got an idea what went wrong?
is there a colour chart anywhere with standardised colours so i have some reference for checking if that's the way it's supposed to be?

greetings,
Micha

[k5astro]

Yeah, I tried to calibrate my macbook pro with a Spider calibrator and wasn't too impressed. I now use the default LCD setup, and I let the printer do its own colour management and get a close approximation of the colour. But in some important cases its not right at all. For example, I could not get a blood red colour out of the printer. It came out kind of brownish. I still don't quite understand the use of profiles. It seems to get farther from correct the more I use them - like Aperture native colour, Adobe RGB, LCD profile, printer profile, paper profile, perceptual or relative colorimetric conversion, etc. etc. Somewhere along the line things get screwed up. I've asked for a course at my local club with no success. I'll bet nobody truly understands it. If someone thinks they understand it, then reply and tell us what are the colour profile conversions taking place between the sensor itself and the LCD when using RAW images in Aperture - because first of all, there must be a sensor profile, right? But nobody ever mentions it.

My guess is that the RAW data is converted to colour pixels by mixing the R, G and B bayer pattern according to their weights, and the result is treated as true unprocessed colour - what I think has been referred to as "Aperture native" - even though it can only be an approximation of the true original scene depending on how accurate the colour filter layer is on the sensor - so some sensors give a cool image whereas others give a warm image. The "native" colour has to be converted to the LCD input, which may not be the full bit range (never mind colour range). So it would have to go through a LCD profile and perceptual or relative conversion. My guess is that the printer should do the same conversion in order to match colours. Another question, when would the printer use perceptual vs relative and how do I know which is being done for the LCD? And if I let Aperture do the colour management for the printer when should I use perceptual or relative?

To answer your last question, yes you can get a standardized colour chart from X-Rite. I'm surprised is wasn't with the colormunki. Its like small 5x7ish plastic case with standard colour patches. If you don't have it, I downloaded a standard JPG image and printed it. The colour won't come out of the printer exactly as it should but you can take a picture of it and match the result on your screen and your reprint of it.