Camera & Monitor Calibrations
Lesson 5 from: Controlling Your ColorJared Platt
Camera & Monitor Calibrations
Lesson 5 from: Controlling Your ColorJared Platt
Lessons
Lesson Info
Camera & Monitor Calibrations
First, you need to calibrate your camera and you need to apply that calibration, that profile, which is a definition of color, inside of your develop menu, in the default setting. From then on out, you'll always have appropriate, calibrated images coming in the door Now, the next thing we need to do, is to make sure that when we're adjusting our images, that our monitors are not lying to us. Because our monitor is always lying to us. From the day you buy the monitor, you set it up, it's telling you a lie. So, we're going to use a screen calibrator I have two different ones. This one is actually for print calibration which we'll talk about, but it can also do monitors. So, if you bought this, which is the I1 pro. It can calibrate a screen. It can calibrate a projector. It can calibrate a monitor, I mean a printer. This one can calibrate your monitor and a projector, but not prints. So, there are all sorts of different ones. All of these are made by X-Rite. They're the same people that m...
ake the Colorchecker Passport. So fantastic system. I just simply plug this in and I'm going to open up their calibration software. So I need to launch the I1 Profiler. And it'll walk me through the process. It's not very difficult to use so I'm not going to go through the whole process with you but I am going to give you some basic understanding of certain things. So, if I am connected to the I1 display, and I don't actually have it plugged in right here, because I don't have an extra port, but you can still see all the options that I have available to me It just says demo mode because the stuff's not plugged in. but what we want to do is we want to create a profile and the way we're going to do that Is we're going to go, Hold on one second, let's just.. We're going to go with basic. You can go to advanced modes and it'll give you a lot more options, but that's a little bit more information than I want to explode your head with so, we're going to go to the basic options and we're just going to go to display profiling and choose to display profile our color LCD display. So, I couldn't find the thing but that's all right, we can still go through most of the process. That is a color profile right there. And it's going to define the color that our monitor shows us. So, what we have to do, is we have to choose some settings. The settings here are a little bit complicated and they don't make a lot of sense. So, I'm going to explain this to you. If you drop this menu down, you'll see you have basically four choices between D75, D65, D55, D50. So 65 basically is daylight, so if you want things to just generally appear like they would in most cases in daylight, that's the one to go for. I actually prefer D55. It's a little bit warmer. Because I don't generally view my prints in daylight. I don't view my photos in daylight. I usually view them indoors somehow With generally warmer light, so I just go for D55. D50 is even warmer, but D55 is perfect. And if you're using a different monitor calibration system than an X-Right system, that's fine but it might just say it a little differently, but you'll see the numbers are the same, so look for a D and then the luminous option, if you go to the luminous option, you have between 250, all the way down to 8. I'm going to prefer a simply because all of my Apple screens are too bright so they're overly bright which means that if I adjust something and my monitor says that it's really bright and I adjust is so it's perfect and I send it out the door, someone else is looking on their computer and it's too dark because my screen was lying to me and telling me it's so bright. This photograph is really bright. So, pay attention to that and make sure you're not going for the brightest version of this. You want to actually dumb your monitor down so that you're adding contrast and brightness to an image. You'll have to get used to which one of these you like, which one seems to make the most sense to you when you send it out the door. So the best way to do it is calibrate the screen, work on an image or two, send them to somebody else and look at them on... You know, send it to your mom. Have your mom pull it up and look at it. See if you're getting a similar result. Now her monitor is not going to be calibrated and is going to look different. But you know yours is. That's the key to the game The key to the game is having confidence in what you're creating If you create something and you have confidence that this is perfect color because I calibrated the camera. I know that the colors are perfect. I know that what I'm adjusting on my screen is perfect because I'm calibrating the actual screen. Then I know that what I'm sending out the door is perfect because I'm calibrating the actual print. If anybody finds a flaw somewhere along the way, it's not you, it's theirs. Right? If I calibrate from start to finish and I send a disc of images to a client and they print them and they get printed poorly, it wasn't me, it was the printer they chose to print it with, right? If I send it to my mom and she says it's too dark, "Mom, you're screen is too dark". Because I'm calibrated scientifically all the way across I know. I have confidence in what I'm seeing. That's really critical for an artist to know that what I'm doing is correct here and if you're not calibrating your camera, and your monitor and your printer, you can't have confidence in that and so you don't know what you're doing. You're just shooting in the dark. You have no idea. And that's not the way to create art. Okay, so you want it to be a little warmer, I think, generally speaking. You could go for D65, but that's daylight. Luminous 100 is where I kinda stick because it dumbs my monitor down a bit. And then the gamma, I just put it on the standard response, which is basically 2.2 gamma. That's pretty much all you have to do. Then you hit start. When you hit start, it's going to ask you to attach your calibration system and you'll simply just open it up like this And you'll hang it on your system like that. So, it just hangs. And it I has to sit flush. so, if the monitor is here, it has to sit perfectly flush. And then you just have to leave it alone. It'll cycle through blacks and blues and greens and reds. It'll go through all these colors here and more. And then once it's done all that, it'll say okay, what I know to be red is actually showing up pink on this monitor and it will dial it back down back to red. So it makes another color conversion definitional change. So now your camera is calibrated and your monitor is calibrated So now your camera and your monitor are both speaking the same language. Red equals red, blue equals blue, green equals green. Then, once I've done that. As soon as I'm finished, it will ask me to name the profile and it'll save it. It's going to save it inside of a folder, way down deep in your system and your system is going to toggle that on as the definition of color for the monitor itself. And you can create different profiles If you go into the advanced profiles, you can even take a print profile that we made earlier, or that we'll make later, actually. You can take a print profile and apply it so that your monitor always looks like the paper you print on. So you can get really advanced if you'd like but that goes way beyond our scope here today.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Bobby McKinney
Excellent class, good job on behalf of Jared Platt
Lauren
My favorite printing class and I've taken quite a few. A lot of very helpful information in a short amount of time. I already owned a Colorchecker passport, so now I know how to make the most of it.
Lydia Hall
Great class on how to achieve color accuracy.