Once your screen is calibrated, what about your printer? Well the output of the printer generally depends on the inks and the paper. You can get calibration devices to scan your prints and build custom profiles but today there is an easier option. Many of the top paper manufacturers have prebuilt profiles for there paper on there websites. Its just a matter of downloading and using.
With a correctly profiled screen and printer, plus using techniques such as soft proofing one can get prints that are close to what you see on the screen.
Profiling your screen is possibly the easiest thing to do. Its also absolutely essential, unless your know the colours you screen is displaying how can you know what you are doing during the editing process.
X-Rite are possibly the best know company in modern profiling technology.
The first step to profiling your screen is to get hold of a measuring tool, for as little as a £100 you can now get a simple screen calibrating tool
Its a simple USB device that measures the output from you screen, the software flashes up known colour values and the calibrator measures the output value, it then generates a screen profile for your computer. This profile then ensures your screen displays colours accurately.
Profiling is a key element of modern digital post processing.
Many people just shoot and publish either on web or paper, but getting your images to look right can be tricky if you do not fully understand all the elements.
Using the correct colour space, shooting RAW, calibrating your monitor are all essential elements to shooting digital and getting good output. Then there is Camera Calibration Profiles, Print Profiles etc. For beginners it can quite a minefield.
There is also the fact that not all monitors are created equal and laptop screens are inferior to desktop monitors, and while it may seem contrary to common sense, Black & White photography needs even higher end monitors then does colour.
A few years ago trying to get all these elements correct would prove extremely challenging but today things are a little easy.
High quality monitors which can approach the AdobeRGB Colour Space are now available well under £1000, cameras have a setting for AdobeRGB, and Software tools like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop support work spaces like ProPhoto RGB, to maximise range of colours and tones available while editing.
Its a fact that while people understand that the computer screen can display a different set of colours and a wider dynamic range it is not better or superior to a paper print. Then there is the web, many browsers while capable of handling colour management some do not. sRGB is still the colour language of the internet and a picture in a web browser is a poor substitute for your own calibrated screen showing your own work in Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop or Apples Aperture, or a fine print.
The best way of learning is to attend a good course on the subject but the next best thing is to purchase the series of video tutorials on the website Luminous Landscape.
Over the next few posts i’ll attempt to offer an introduction to the art of profiling, because without it no matter how you edit your photographs you are working in the dark.
The V1 was initially dismissed by many as being an over expensive system with too small a sensor. While I still think its over priced and has some ergonomic issues, its actually not a bad camera, with good image quality and its one of the fastest focusing mirrorless cameras.
I bought mine with the standard zoom, telephoto zoom and the 10mm f/2.8 prime. It seems a while since some more lens have come along. We had the Nikon 11-27.5mm f/3.5-5.6 but that was not much different to the existing Nikon 10-30mm f/3.5-5.6 VR which I already had.
Finally now we seem to have some nice primes coming through and a wide angle zoom.
The new zoom is a Nikon 6.7-13mm f/3.5-5.6 VR wide angle and there is a new prime Nikon 18.5mm f/1.8. The most interesting of the bunch is the new 32mm f/1.2.
Yes you heard right a f/1.2. This fast lens goes a long way to addressing many concerns about the small sensor size. While you are never going to get selective depth of field as with a full frame sensor it produces a pleasing out of focus backgrounds.
I am still using my Nikon as a compact and keep thinking about replacing it with something like a Nikon Coolpix A or Ricoh GR, which have large sensors but if Nikon keep investing in some interesting glass and finally produce a V system body that addresses my usability issues with the V1 has and were not full addresses in the V2, I might stay with the system and invest in a little more glass.
If you are interested in seeing some of the new features in Adobe Lightroom V5, B&H together with Scott Kelby have put together a free video available on line here.
The Panasonic GF-1 was a stunning little m4/3 camera. Aimed at the enthusiast the biggest issue to me was the lack of viewfinder, and that was addressed with the plug in EVF.
Then Panasonic seemed to loose there way a little with the GF series and each new version seemed to be dumbed down and aimed more at the camera novice.
They then released the GX-1 which returned the camera more to its GF-1 roots. Finally though it looks like Panasonic have delivered the goods with the new GX-7 with the first tilting built in EVF.
All the normal review sites should have a review by now including www.sansmirror.com
Where possible I have tried to standardise on as few post production software packages as I can.
The majority of my work is all done in Adobe Lightroom but sometimes you need either the added power of a third party plug-in or application or its just easier to do in some packages.
I feel its better to be a master of one package and try to do as much as I can in it.
In the above photograph you have a basic flatly rendered JPeg, I have just added a crop to tighten up the image. I then ran it through my usual Adobe Lightroom work flow and I was pleased with the result but I still felt it lacked a little zing.
Postproduction in Lightroom
So I exported it as a tif into Photoshop CC to see what I could do with it in there. Now starting with a colour image there are at least four different ways to process an image to make it Black & White, including some very advanced techniques using LAB mode and also creating separate layers each Black & White based on the luminance values of each of the Red, Green and Blue Channels. All of which give very advanced control. Here through I just wanted the image to have a bit more pop and zing!
Dodge and Burn, Overlay method
First of all I thought I would do a little more dodging and burning to improve the local contrast of a few areas. Now the dodge and burn tool in Photoshop is not the best and can cause issues and colour shift. Not too important with a Black & White image but still there are better ways of accomplishing this.
Now this technique is one that I learn’t from a printing tutorial by Jeff Schewe. Create a new layer and fill it with 50% Gray.
Now set the Layer mode to Overlay. Now to lighten parts of the image just paint on this lay with white (Dodge) and to darken parts of the image, just paint on this layer with black (Burn). Using a soft edged brush you can quickly and easily fine tune the image.
The next part is the contrast. I want the darker parts of the image to have a real boost in the contrast. I do this with a curves adjustment. While this has been possible in Lightroom since V4 it is more controllable in Photoshop.
Levels
For the dark portion of the image I have added two control points to steepen the curve and thus the contrast. I have added a third control point to bring down the mid-tones and return the highlights back to normal. For this image I felt the contrast in the mid-tones was still a little to high so I added a second Curves layer to bring it back under control.
I finished the image with a little sharpening.
So here is the finished image and this months “Picture of the Month”. I did try and reproduce this just in Lightroom but I could not get the same degree of control and the image lacked contrast.
Leica M8
Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron-M ASPH
35mm, 1/125 Sec at f/5.6, ISO160
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom V5 & Adobe Photoshop CC
On a Mac MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.8.4
Once your screen is calibrated, what about your printer? Well the output of the printer generally depends on the inks and the paper. You can get calibration devices to scan your prints and build custom profiles but today there is an easier option. Many of the top paper manufacturers have prebuilt profiles for there paper on there websites. Its just a matter of downloading and using.
