From: "Buddy Walters" <IRBWalters@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In general, I agree with Buddy, except I'd qualify:
IMO we are still a few years away from perfecting the Ink Jets for archival.
with "in the consumer price range." Buddy, go back to Pro Photo and
look at their prints from the Roland printer. I was blown away, and I
do not blow away easily! :-)
I should also warn you about a little, well - lets just say a very BIG &
FRUSTRATING PROBLEM. That is calibrating your, slides on the light table
with your scanner, monitor and PRINTER...
I don't want to start a platform war -- REALLY -- some of my best
friends use Windows! But this is one area in which the Mac really
shines, and is one reason a lot of graphics professionals will give
up their Macs when you pry them from their cold, dead fingers.
MacOS has had an integrated color management system (CMS) for years.
Windows 2000 is supposed to have an integrated CMS, and you can get
"glue on" CMSs for other Windows versions, but they're still playing
catch-up, and will continue to be behind for some time.
Also bad news for Windows users -- Microsoft has endorsed the sRGB
(the "s" seems to be for "stupid" :-) color space as their standard.
This is a "least common denominator" color space, carefully chosen to
have no more gamut than the cheapest 13" VGA monitor from Thailand.
If you have a film scanner worth more than a few hundred dollars, or
a nice Trinitron monitor, or want to use CMYK archival ink, your
color gamut is clipped when you use sRGB.
What you see is not always What you get!
It is on my machine! Most color devices intended for the Mac market
come with color profiles, and you calibrate your monitor to generate
a monitor profile, then you select a working color space that is a
superset of all your device profiles.
When you scan, the scanner color profile is embedded in the file.
This keeps the characteristics of the scanner with each image it
scans. Then when you read a scan into Photoshop, you convert the scan
from your scanner profile to your working profile, such as Adobe
(gamma 2.2 for Wintel) or Apple (gamma 1.8). I have this set to
happen automatically if Photoshop opens a file that is not already in
the working profile, since I generally use only one scanner.
In MacOS (and possibly W2k, or other Windows with third-party CMSs),
the monitor driver uses the monitor profile to automatically convert
from your working color space. Now the image on your screen is
extremely close to the slide on a 5000K light table.
When you print, Mac printer drivers generally let you specify a
printer profile. If you select the proper profile, another color
conversion takes place, and your print looks like your screen looks
like your light table.
The Roland has superb CMS support, with some 30 or more profiles for
various combinations of paper, ink, and resolution. With the proper
profile, I can print on cheap flat matte ($0.38/sqft) proofing paper,
or on super gloss PET film ($2.50/sqft) or anything in between, and
the in-gamut colors match perfectly. (Of course, the cheap paper
doesn't have as wide a gamut as the expensive film.)
I have friends who struggle to match colors on their Wintel machines.
With MacOS, it's a big surprise when things DON'T match
automatically! There are many good reasons for preferring Wintel
machines, but color management isn't one of them.
: Jan Steinman <mailto:Jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: Bytesmiths <http://www.bytesmiths.com>
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