Re: Of optical brightener
Re: Of optical brightener
- Subject: Re: Of optical brightener
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2001 09:51:39 +0200
John wrote:
Another way to detect optical brighteners in your papers is to turn
off all your lights and illuminate the surface of a sheet with a
black light. If the sheet glows a bright bluish white, then there
are brighteners present.
For contrast, take a plain piece of bond (copier) paper and
illuminate it with the black light. It will barely light up.
You can usually get a portable, battery-powered black light at your
nearest WalMart or Target.
I just love cross-platform solutions ;o)
Me, too.
And solutions like yours which are simple = practical = workable.
The discussion of optical brightener was one of the threads I ran
into the List while trying to get users to understand the intricacies
of simulation. The technicalities were summed up in ABC
Characterizing last year.
But the downside was that a lot of people are now being told they
cannot eat or sleep or even breathe without white point editing and
whatever lamps in their spectros and who knows what, and we breathed
just fine back last year and the year before and the year before that.
Avoiding optical brightener is one of a few things you MUST check up
on when optimising the color space of your studio printer. But it is
nuts to buy a good printer and then load bad paper into it, or bad
inks for that matter.
Just like you would be nuts to set your monitor to 9300 Kelvin or go
down into the deep deep reds in the white point. Not that your
profile couldn't correct for it, just as a white point edit can
correct for optical brightener, but as a creative professional you
want to optimise the color space of your studio monitor and the color
space of your studio printer.
And de-optimise the potty salespeople trying to sell you color
copiers with self-luminous papers for proofing. On those special
special Xerox contracts which take a jailbreak to get out of -:).
It really isn't big science, just common horse sense. And I wish the
sales and consultants side would knock off on the technicalities and
just help folks get up and get running. Which doesn't take the world,
as you note -:).