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I had to recalibrate my monitors today. That being said, I forced myself to investigate deeper into ICC profiling.
For those that don't know, ICC is the main organization which tries to ensure color fidelity between operating systems, monitors, scanners, digital cameras, and printers. Since there's so many different manufacturers of equipment, ICC was setup with the intent of making sure 'your apples look like apples' from computer to computer to printout.
So I began my little investigation after toying with Photoshop's color settings.
1) sRGB was an 'standard' setup by a HP/Microsoft trying to make sure people's colors matched. It is an ICC profile for Windows. Most people use sRGB (unknowingly.) For example, when you save to PDF the profile by default is sRGB.
From HP's own/old sRGB website: "The goal of sRGB is to develop an '80%' solution."
"Critics of sRGB also point out that the sRGB gamut (the range of all the colors it defines) is much smaller than all the colors the human eye can see.
Proponents of sRGB acknowledge the limitations, but also point out that sRGB gamut is close to the actual gamut of most monitors, and includes most of the colors available on most printers attached to computers, so there is little or no color information actually lost in images that are meant to be viewed on screen or printed on a desktop printer." - from http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1163281,00.asp
2) sRGB by default doesn't work on Apples/Macs unless they have manually installed the profiles or use Colorsync. So if your clients (which most people in print do) work on Macs, your image is not going to look close to what you intended on giving them.
3) Microsoft in-turn to sRGB's limitations said they were going to release 'scRGB', which contains floating point data (information not perceived/going beyond by the human eye.) It is currently used in Windows Vista.
Some conclusions:
I looked up the ICC website - the people that actually sets standards in place to see what profile they were currently recommending. It's interesting, and it's not the standard sRGB we all use that ships with Adobe (sRGB IEC61966-2.1.)
It's purported to be ALOT better:
http://www.color.org - go to the 'V4' tab.
These ICC profiles get installed here:
/Windows/System32/Spool/Drivers/Color
A download to their latest .icc profile from ICC:
http://www.color.org/srgbprofiles.xalter
To be honest, you probably won't notice much of a visible difference between v2 and v4 ICC profiles on an image that you open up. It may be a more of a noticeable difference if you work in floating point images such as those employed by Linear Workflow or other forms of floating-point related post-production.
Another versions of V4 implementation is located here at the top:
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/photoshop/index.htm - I'm thinking about using his 'eciRGB v2 ICCv4' which looks different (possibly better?) than my standard sRGB that I used to use.
For those that don't know, ICC is the main organization which tries to ensure color fidelity between operating systems, monitors, scanners, digital cameras, and printers. Since there's so many different manufacturers of equipment, ICC was setup with the intent of making sure 'your apples look like apples' from computer to computer to printout.
So I began my little investigation after toying with Photoshop's color settings.
1) sRGB was an 'standard' setup by a HP/Microsoft trying to make sure people's colors matched. It is an ICC profile for Windows. Most people use sRGB (unknowingly.) For example, when you save to PDF the profile by default is sRGB.
From HP's own/old sRGB website: "The goal of sRGB is to develop an '80%' solution."
"Critics of sRGB also point out that the sRGB gamut (the range of all the colors it defines) is much smaller than all the colors the human eye can see.
Proponents of sRGB acknowledge the limitations, but also point out that sRGB gamut is close to the actual gamut of most monitors, and includes most of the colors available on most printers attached to computers, so there is little or no color information actually lost in images that are meant to be viewed on screen or printed on a desktop printer." - from http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1163281,00.asp
2) sRGB by default doesn't work on Apples/Macs unless they have manually installed the profiles or use Colorsync. So if your clients (which most people in print do) work on Macs, your image is not going to look close to what you intended on giving them.
3) Microsoft in-turn to sRGB's limitations said they were going to release 'scRGB', which contains floating point data (information not perceived/going beyond by the human eye.) It is currently used in Windows Vista.
Some conclusions:
I looked up the ICC website - the people that actually sets standards in place to see what profile they were currently recommending. It's interesting, and it's not the standard sRGB we all use that ships with Adobe (sRGB IEC61966-2.1.)
It's purported to be ALOT better:
http://www.color.org - go to the 'V4' tab.
These ICC profiles get installed here:
/Windows/System32/Spool/Drivers/Color
A download to their latest .icc profile from ICC:
http://www.color.org/srgbprofiles.xalter
To be honest, you probably won't notice much of a visible difference between v2 and v4 ICC profiles on an image that you open up. It may be a more of a noticeable difference if you work in floating point images such as those employed by Linear Workflow or other forms of floating-point related post-production.
Another versions of V4 implementation is located here at the top:
http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/photoshop/index.htm - I'm thinking about using his 'eciRGB v2 ICCv4' which looks different (possibly better?) than my standard sRGB that I used to use.
) those charts are very close to 99% grey here too!
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