On Mar 7, 2019, at 12:04 AM, Refik Telhan <rtelhan@icloud.com> wrote:
The widths and the peak wavelengths of the band-pass filters are different for each monitor. Given the that absorbance curves of the SML cone pigments for each individual is slightly different (the standard viewer is just an average), it is not surprising that we perceive monitors differently. A through testing is a must to find the best match for each lightbox, monitor and viewer combination.
I’d heartily agree that more research is called for, and that many will wish to do their own experimentation to find what they’re most comfortable with. But there’s also an elephant in the room whose general direction you’re pointing at, and we should also be addressing the elephant. Specifically...we have all these high-precision technologies for measuring color — and yet, in the graphic arts industry, the consumers of the products are doing their own evaluations with their own eyes. It has the feeling to me of a T-shirt maker using engineering techniques suited for jet engine manufacture. When you buy a T-shirt, you don’t expect it to be a perfect custom fit. Nor do you expect it to fit the same way after you wash it — and, for that matter, you don’t even expect it to fit the same way after you gorge yourself on a Thanksgiving dinner. You especially don’t expect the same shirt to fit anybody else the same way. Color perception is potentially even more dramatically variable. Go outside on a sunny day. Close both eyes, but cover one (and only one) especially well with your hand or your arm. Point your face at the sun for a minute or three. The closed-but-uncovered eye will have lots of long / red cone fatigue. The closed-and-covered eye will be heading towards dark adaptation. The color perception differences between the two eyes will be very dramatic! Never mind the perennial philosophical pondering of “Is your red the same as my red?” Your own red is never _exactly_ the same any two times in your life — so why should you expect anybody else’s red to ever be exactly the same as yours? This is not, of course, to suggest that we should just throw our hands in the air and give up. It _is,_ however, a suggestion that we should stop measuring with micrometers and instead start marking with chalk. Let’s say your monitor and viewing booth are both perfectly matched, your ambient lighting is a perfect D50 spectral match, walls are all neutral gray, and you’re even wearing a neutral gray body suit... ...so what? Your client is going to be reading your magazine in a doctor’s office with flickering greenish fluorescent tubes with fifteen-year-old ballasts. Your print is going to be hung over the receptionist’s desk, where it’s going to reflect the glare from her $50 Dell monitor — and never mind the fluorescent pink athleisure top she’s wearing today. So...make sure your editing environment is one your clients would be happy to spend some time in. For most, that means a nice office setting without any really glaring colors — and maybe put some effort into getting better-than-average lighting. Calibrate your monitor to a white point roughly (+/- 1000K) the same as ambient (and get a good profile of the monitor). If you can’t make proof prints on the same stock as the final, at least get something with a similar amount of OBA. Use a good ICC-aware color management chain — and always use perceptual rendering unless you know exactly why you want something different. (A good perceptual rendering is going to “bake in” common human visual system quirks better than any of the colorimetric ones; since the final consumer is almost always an human and not a colorimeter, that’s typically what you want.) And then don’t think about color again until you actually have a problem you need to solve. Even then, suspect that your problem is more likely to be with out-of-gamut colors (including poor gamut mapping) than with your display calibration or the like. Instead, focus more on the content and artistry of the work you’re trying to reproduce.... Cheers, b&