Compare Monitor to Physical Prints
Lesson 39 from: The Professional Photographer’s Digital WorkflowMichael Clark
Compare Monitor to Physical Prints
Lesson 39 from: The Professional Photographer’s Digital WorkflowMichael Clark
Lessons
Class Introduction
08:17 2Shooting Workflow: Set-up The Camera
15:43 3Shooting Workflow: Histograms and Exposure
18:14 4Shooting Workflow: Sensor Cleaning
32:50 5Overview of Color Management
17:31 6Color Management: Monitor
11:49 7Color Management: Workspace
03:40 8Color Management: Monitor Calibration
25:52Color Management: Do I Need This?
03:42 10Introduction to Lightroom®
05:44 11Download & Import Images With Lightroom®
06:32 12Lightroom® Preferences
09:09 13Six Ways to Speed-up Lightroom®
14:02 14To DNG or Not to DNG?
06:47 15A Logical Editing Process in Lightroom®
08:56 16File & Folder Naming in Lightroom®
08:39 17Batch Renaming in Lightroom®
05:51 18Entering Metadata in Lightroom®
03:35 19Managing Images in Lightroom®
07:39 20Introduction to the Develop Module in Lightroom®
04:45 21Lightroom® Develop Module
24:01 22Sharpening, Chromatic Aberration & Vignetting in Lightroom®
12:34 23Graduated Filters & Spot Tool in Lightroom®
09:59 24Converting images to Black & White in Lightroom®
13:01 25Creating Panoramas in Lightroom
07:46 26Creating HDR Images in Lightroom®
09:29 27Lightroom® to Photoshop® Workflow
07:04 28Export Images to Photoshop®
08:54 29Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Basic Adjustments
36:49 30Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Retouching
15:16 31Finalizing Images in Photoshop®: Saving Master Files
09:45 32Make Fine Art Prints: The Cost
15:37 33Make Fine Art Prints: Ink Jet Printers
05:23 34Make Fine Art Prints: Ink Jet Papers
10:14 35Make Fine Art Prints: Understand ICC Profiles
08:44 36Make Fine Art Prints: Sharpen Image
18:26 37Printing From Photoshop®
09:11 38Printing From Lightroom®
05:07 39Compare Monitor to Physical Prints
06:33 40Printing Black & White Image
09:10 41Extended Workflow: Back Up Images
35:19 42Extended Workflow: Storage Options
18:32 43Extended Workflow: Archiving Images
15:55 44Submitting images to Clients
28:32 45Prepping Images for Social Media
08:44 46Alternative Workflows
08:49 47Final Q&A
19:56Lesson Info
Compare Monitor to Physical Prints
So if I just take this print off of here and I walk over into a dark corner, am I'm looking at it like wow, that's really dark and I look over at my monitor, well (pfft) sure it's dark because you're not looking at it in the correct lighting. So I'm gonna come around here. There's two manufacturers, oh we just made the same print that we made before. But just to show you, there's two manufacturers that I know of, there might be more, that make print viewing boxes. And this one is actually tunable to go up or down. I think I turned it off. So this is the correct brightness at full brightness on this print viewing box. And it's a D50 or a 5,000 degree Kelvin daylight balance box which is what these printers and pretty much every photo printer is tuned to. So that when this is the correct way to judge, if your print is bright enough or dark enough. If I turn around the monitor here, and let me actually go back. Well, let me go back to this image. And I'll make it full screen, so it's real...
ly big. And we can look and hopefully they look pretty similar. Because of how it's, it seems a little darker there, but what's going on here is we've got such a bright environment here, it's hard to judge with this much light and with all of these lights pointing straight at this monitor. That. But, in reality, they're pretty close. This monitor may be a little dark but I think that's mostly our environment, not the monitor itself. But, color-wise, I would say that's looking pretty accurate, when I'm looking at this monitor on the back, this looks totally different than what I'm seeing when it's pointing the other direction, Just so you're aware. So we've got massive environment issues. We turn the lights off in here and looked at those two they'd be a lot closer than they appear right now. And the thing is, you know, these are, I think that's like a $400 or $500 light viewing box. You know, so do you need to buy that thing if you're gonna print a lot? It might help. You know, if you're gonna print a lot, I would probably buy a print viewing box. GTI is one of the biggest companies in the world that makes these. The other company from Germany is called Just Normlicht. I have one of Just Normlicht's boxes. It doesn't really matter which brand you get. They're both great. They make giant ones that you would see at a graphic design firm where they put up huge prints to match color or see stuff. If you don't want to spend that much money, like I was saying earlier, you can get a SoLux light bulb that's balanced to D or 5,500 degrees Kelvin whichever one you wanna get and you can put that about 20 inches away from your print. It's not quite of, a clean or easy way to see your print in all it's glory like this is, but it'll at least have a color balance reference and 20 inches away is the magic distance to be the right brightness on your print. If you're gonna make this print for somebody whose hanging the print up in their home, you know, if they're gonna spend $2,000 on a print, I might highly recommend they buy some track lighting and get a few of those bulbs to light up that print. If they're not willing to do that, you know, and they're on the other side of the country, I can't really go over their house and like figure out how, what the color of their lighting is, so I just hope that it's close or I say buy some daylight balance bulbs at the hardware store and they're gonna be better than, you know, whatever bulbs they may have to show that print. At least put some light on it. Don't just let it sit in a dark corner of your house. One of our students asked, if you do already know that the client is going to be viewing the image in a non-daylight lit area, like an office, or a closed room, do you try and anticipate that and, potentially if they communicate that to you? Yeah, unless you can physically go there, and you have the $1,500 i1Photo Pro that can measure, or you have a color temperature light meter, it's gonna be very difficult for you to do anything about that. If it's an office environment and they have the giant, long tubes, you know, of lighting in the ceiling, you hope for the best and you see what happens and you find out when you send them to print, if it looks horrible then you can change stuff. You can guesstimate but that gets really dangerous fast, I would say. So there's no good answer to that question necessarily. And this is getting really persnickety with printing. I mean, people who are printing their work that actually know about color temperature and light temperature like this, and actually do something about it, is a very small percentage of photographers or printers really thinking about this. There's other ways of getting around that issue. You can actually buy from SoLux, a clamp that will sit on top of the print, the framed print, and it has an arm that reaches out and has a bulb. So that would probably be my response. It's like go buy this $60 clamp and a $6 bulb, and put that in front of the print so at least you're getting some color balance light on the print to make sure it's being viewed the way it should be viewed. This is a much bigger issue in a museum or a gallery, than it typically is at, you know, an office setting. It also depends on the image. If it's this picture of a wave, nobody really cares if the colors look off. They just assume that's how it looked. If it's a picture of the CEO of the company and the skin tones look purple, that's not gonna fly. So, you may actually just de-saturate the image a little bit to avoid that. That might be another way of doing it but that's a little, you may not be able to de-saturate it enough to actually make any difference. So it depends on the situation but the buying a clamp to sit on the picture would be the easiest option.
Class Materials
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Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Michael is a true professional and readily explains all of the nitty gritty issues of a photographer's digital workflow, including important things like Color Management, Lightroom workflows, Printing, and more. He is eager to answer your questions and has a thorough knowledge (after all, he worked with the original engineers at Adobe and wrote a book on it) and passion that he loves to share. He can get way deep into the subject, which I found fascinating. You can tell Michael has great experience in teaching and also likes to learn from his students. He is very authentic, honest, and direct. I highly recommend this class, and look forward to another one of Michael's courses in the future!
a Creativelive Student
This is an excellent course. It reinforced what I already knew and enhanced my spotty skills with new knowledge. I really like Michael's explanation of saving the document for print and web and the importance of doing these differently. Using the histogram to show this was terrific. Each session there is some valuable gem.
Elizabeth Harrigan
This class is fantastic and is just what I was looking for! The teacher knows the subject WELL and he makes it understandable and easy to follow along. In each segment, he gets right to the point explaining just enough content to make it understandable. He doesn't waste your time. I highly recommend this class. It's the best tech class I have watched on Creative Live.
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