Color Match

[glorybound]

How are you guys/gals handling getting clients to see what you want them to see as far as colors? Do you snail mail them a hard copy? We have a couple dozen printers in-house and if I were to send an image to all of them all would print out with different colors. Is there a palette (primary colors) that is best to chose from for simple prelim images? How about on screen? I personal have three monitors in my office and all 3 display different. When clients get images and the images are viewed on there non-calibrated monitors colors can be way off.

Any tips would be helpful.

[voltron7]

Hmm, I know there are tons of threads about this.
I personally, used to have a hardware calibrated monitor,
but have abandoned it after leaving CRT and adopting a linear flow. I used to occasionally have some comments with colors being off,
but that was years ago and have had none since. I work closely with some interior designers using specific paint colors
and have not ever had any issues with the colors being way off. I've also seen some of my renderings printed
by the clients' print company and they pretty much have looked like what I see on my screens.
Normally i just send them pngs for their review. I always try to use real colors from mfr. and if the client hasn't picked one, I pick one that closely matches
their request. Then I make a small map of the color in CS3 and use that....I'm sure there are sooo many different approaches, but this has been working great for me
for the last 2 years or so. Hope that helps. Also, there are Photoshop color pallets you may download from many paint manufactures.
I have never mailed a hard copy or had that requested.
HTH

[dlparisi]

Calibrate your own monitor using a hardware tool (spyder, i1 display, huey, etc). If you need it you can also calibrate your printers and scanners using similar tools. As for the clients, I don't make apologies for their monitors but do explain to them that colors can look different on different monitors. Tell them your monitor is precisely calibrated to industry standards and that their monitor is screwing it up. There are several free online tools to get pretty darn close just using a visual calibration (i.e., without a puck) that they can use if they are that concerned abut colors. Otherwise, if they want an accurate printout either send it out to a lab to be printed ($$$) or calibrate your own printers and print ($), either way charge them for their inability to see accurate colors on their monitor. It's not your fault.

[3DMK]

Calibrate your own monitor using a hardware tool (spyder, i1 display, huey, etc). If you need it you can also calibrate your printers and scanners using similar tools. As for the clients, I don't make apologies for their monitors but do explain to them that colors can look different on different monitors. Tell them your monitor is precisely calibrated to industry standards and that their monitor is screwing it up. There are several free online tools to get pretty darn close just using a visual calibration (i.e., without a puck) that they can use if they are that concerned abut colors. Otherwise, if they want an accurate printout either send it out to a lab to be printed ($$$) or calibrate your own printers and print ($), either way charge them for their inability to see accurate colors on their monitor. It's not your fault.

Pretty much a perfect answer!

As dlparisi said... callibrate your monitors at least [Spyder pro costs under $300] and then tell them to worry about it at their end!

Most clients don't know much about this stuff at all.......a lot of 3d guys don't even do it, I only started doing it last year but it DOES make a difference...

it's not IF your monitor is out.... but by HOW much it is out. [Unless of course you spent $2000 on a proffesional graphics monitor]

Calibrating is even more important when you have different monitors in your studio!!!!


Cheers

[powerandrubber]

I use an Eye One for about $100 which I think got bought out and is under a different name now. Anyway it calibrates your screen to a certain "standard" as already mentioned but I forget the specs of that standard (color temperature and gamma mostly I think). And it creates a custom profile ICC file and sets it as the default color profile in windows (somewhere in your display settings). I get perfect color from Costco and Modern Postcard for what that's worth. For your own printer(s), I'd stick to one printer that is a higher end photo quality ink jet, they are cheap these days. Most higher end color printers should come with color profiles (ICC files) on the included disk or be avail from the manufacturer website. For the old but good Epson 1440 at my last job, there was a few different profiles for different papers. Photo paper, heavyweight matte, pro glossy etc. It was important to use Epson cartridges after once trying Staples brand which sucked. Anyway computer screens vary as you well know, even over time the same screen can change though not so much with new LCDs. Printers don't tend to vary nearly as much so the supplied ICCs might be suitable. If not there are calibration tools for printers as well which will cost more $. The next thing to know is that you can't simply hit the print button and go. You have to use software such as photoshop (in CS2 "print with preview" gives the necessary options such as "let photoshop determine colors") that knows your calibrated monitor profile and let's you specify a printer profile. Turn off any "automatic" color correction. The goal is for the software to know what the color looks like on your screen (via the calibrated monitor profile created by a device like the Eye One) and send the correct info to your printer (via printer-paper profile) to get that color print matching. Even still, keep in mind that paper prints will never have the color display range/quality as a computer screen. Screens use RGB, printers use CMYK so there's some translation going on there. With the Epson 1440 I had near perfect results with matte heavyweight paper but I had to brighten 10% before printing even with all the calibration and profiling. Now I just use Costco since I rarely need a hardcopy. Good luck, color profiling is a pain but the only way.

One more thing, Win7 doesn't always load the calibrated color profile for some reason. It seems like it has improved since I started probably via windows updates. But I notice it happening when logging off and logging back on, hasn't happened to me in a while when booting (might be fixed). When it doesn't load, everything looks too blue and is very noticeable. I use a free utility called "LUT Manager" to load the right profile when this happens. You'd think microsoft would have corrected all this by now. It was never a problem with XP or Vista for me.

[glorybound]

Thanks for all the feedback guys, very helpful. I have SpyderPro, but unfortunatly it doesn't work on my Vista 64 machine, it never can fine the USB device.

[percydaman]

Definitely agree with the above regarding hardware calibration. Make sure your monitors are regularly calibrated, and just ask the client when's the last time they calibrated their monitors. Likely the answer will be never so that should take care of that :P

[Donald2B]

Thanks for all the feedback guys, very helpful. I have SpyderPro, but unfortunatly it doesn't work on my Vista 64 machine, it never can fine the USB device.

You have to download special drivers for the Spyder Pro to see the USB device. The same goes for the iDisplay2 stuff. I have both of them here @ work. I prefer the iDisplay2 calibration, but either one will be better than nothing.

My only problem is trying to find the proper brightness value to use...that seems to be more of an arbitrary value of what you find appealing. I having just started researching the proper values to be used with LCD monitors.

[Neilg]

We just calibrate our end and they tend to agree that if it looks crap their end it's probably their monitor.

We'll brighten up dark bits to an extent if asked to and all that, but when they say 'why does the image have a red tint' we just tell them to trust us. Not in those exact words though...