Stanley, That is in absolutely fantastic story, and there is a good deal of truth to the observation that contemporary viewers are so used to seeing clean and bright color that anything else tends to look like a mistake. It has happened to me, and with originals, not reproductions. A few years ago I was visiting the Ansel Adams collection at LACMA. A little voice in my head kept saying, "Gee, shouldn't he bump up the contrast a little?" Clearly my eye had been completely corrupted by all the commercial advertising campaigns I had worked on over the years where there is no such thing as too much. I ad to take a moment to clear my head of the countless bight shiny images that advertisers had used to get my attention over the years and recalibrate to a different viewing experience. On the subject of colorimetric accuracy in digital photography, I tend to agree that this does not..cannot...have the same meaning in creative scene photography as it would in archival reproduction or static product photography. After all, creative photographers are striving for a "look", not a reproduction. For these uses, I would suggest that the proper way to think about a camera profile would be similar to the way photographers traditionally related to known film types. Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and all the rest were characterized by the manufacturers relative to known and controlled lighting and development conditions..and this was simply the starting point once photographers went into the field and started shooting under completely variable lighting, exposure and development conditions. If a profile is understood and used in the same way that knowledge of film charactistics was used for lifetimes, I think that the knotty issues would tend to dissolve away to a large degree. Glenn Andrews, Certified G7 Expert Color Clarity 818 886-1037 O 818 263-7789 M 818 975-5239 F glenncolorguy@yahoo.com www.colorclarity.net http://colorclarity.blogspot.com ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:48:56 -0700 From: Stanley Smith <ssmith@getty.edu> To: José Ángel Bueno García <jbueno61@gmail.com> Cc: Jeffrey Stevensen <jeffstev@maine.rr.com>, colorsync-users <colorsync-users@lists.apple.com> Subject: Re: Colorimetric Accuracy in the Field Message-ID: <51AE0C68020000B60012453E@mail.getty.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Well, the obvious goal is dE2000 =0.0. -- a goal that is equally obviously not attainable. Sure, we reproduce our paintings in books, on displays at a press check, and projected on unpredictable machines for lectures. I would gently suggest that given the truly bad color memory we all have, that if the color presented on any of these platforms is not "accurate" to the degree that everyone here seems to be striving for, it won't make a damn bit of difference to the viewer. These differences are really only noticeable when you compare the reproduction with the original in a controlled setting, and I never see visitors to the Getty walking around the gallery with the catalog open-- eyes darting from the book to the painting (I'm somewhat embarrassed to note that I do this all the time, and it is often a sobering experience). Of course we need to be close, and we do strive for that, but we have no control over the viewing conditions of a person leafing through one of our catalogs-- a fact that renders extreme color accuracy standards moot. One more thing-- Just because curators strive for accuracy in reproduction, it doesn't mean that publishing professionals always do. I've told this story more than once: We had a big Paul Strand show a few years back, and I did what I mentioned above-- walked around the gallery with the book open. Strand printed very dark and flat-- he loved the murky print. Our reproductions were shockingly different, but looked much like other reproductions of his work that I had seen in the past-- normal contrast and more open shadows. When I asked our publisher why there was such a difference the answer was very revealing: They couldn't sell any books if they had faithfully reproduced the original prints-- it would have looked like a mistake. In Strand's defense, I believe he was used to throwing a lot of light on a print when evaluating-- not a lighting condition that is often reproduced by a casual viewer. Stanley Smith J. Paul Getty Museum Stanley Smith Head of Collection Information and Access J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1000 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1687 (310) 440-7286