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June 2008 Update Message from Image Science

 

 

Image Science June 2008 News

Hi

Welcome to our June 2008 newsletter. We've got several exciting things to talk about this time:

Eizo CG222W

ColorEdge Quality at an amazing price!

This amazing monitor has almost all the quality features of its big brother the CG241W (which I own, see the article below)....this one is only two inches smaller...and is almost $1000 cheaper. It comes with the full CG warranty, of course, so if you've been lusting after a CG quality monitor but have been scared off by the price tag - now's your chance to step up to the monitors that are unquestionably the best available for accurate colour work

CG222W

As a special introductory offer for our newsletter subscribers we are offering a free custom profile (worth $75) with ever monitor bought at our great price of $2350. This offer is not being advertised online and is only available if you order by phone and mention this offer. Please note this offer is only valid until June 31st 2008.

We are expecting our stock in mid June but many of the first order are already pre-sold so it's very much a first come first served proposition as this monitor will sell out. It's quite amazing technology at this price point. So confirm your order now to get in line for a lovely new toy!

The Eizo CG222W at Image Science (but remember the special mentioned above is not online - you have to ring us if you want the free profile!)

Hoods and Software Upgrades

Also - Eizo Hoods On Special! Eizo are clearing their stock of older CH3 widescreen monitor hoods - this hood does not fit the SX2461W or the S2231W, but does fit the S2410W, S2411W, CE240W, CE210W and the S2110W. If you have one of these and figure you may want a hood for it at any point, now would be the time to snap one up. Again, please give us a call to take advantage of this offer.

Also of note for CG monitor owners - ColorNavigator 5.1 one is out and is definitely worth the upgrade if you're using an older version. You can download it from www.eizo.com.au

Hahnemuhle Bamboo

Ecologically Friendly Fine Art Paper

Hahnemuhle have launched a wonderful new paper called simply 'Bamboo' - this paper is made from 90% easily renewable bamboo fibres, with the remaining 10% being cotton. It's a lovely fine art paper with a character similar to the venerable Photo Rag, but with a distinctly richer and warmer tone - it's particularly lovely and rich with black and white portraits, but surprisingly versatile with other subjects as well. Hahnemuhle have done their best to consider the environment at all stages of the construction of this paper and consequently it has already won a number of environmental awards. Well worth a try.

Hahnemuhle Bamboo at Image Science

Harman Warmtone

Harman have released the warm tone version of their fibre based matte paper. It has the same lovely silky feel but is much warmer in tone, and is completely optical brightener free, so much more gallery friendly. 5 sheet sample packs are available.

Harman Warmtone at Image Science

The Drobo Storage System

(and a bargain NAS offer!)

We're now carrying the new Drobo 'storage robot'. Basically, this is an extremely easy to use high volume storage device. You fill it up with inexpensive hard disks, and instantly add masses of safe storage to your system. (For the technically minded - it's essentially a RIAD based NAS system but with all the complexity these systems usually have taken away!). It's incredibly easy to use, inexpensive, and even quite stylish (for a computer peripheral!).

Drobo

It's the perfect complement to a large image library!

The Drobo at Image Science

We've also got a similar product on sale, second hand. This one is a ReadyNAS unit (made by Netgear) and is much the same sort of thing - not quite as simple as the Drobo but very cheaply priced! We used to use it here but we don't need it anymore due to a new server purchase. It's priced to sell at $400 (new units are $1000 plus)

2nd Hand ReadyNAS unit at Image Science.

I Vote For Art!

A very nice guy and a good client of ours, Ben Rowe, has just launched an excellent new venture, supporting original art, and I suggest you take a look (and maybe even buy some of the very affordable, lovely prints on offer!). Ben has selected some really talented young artists from around the globe and created a great, easy to use site for exploring their work. Here's his blurb:

ivoteforart.com is a brand new online art gallery / store where you can buy art as well as vote for your favourite artworks. ivoteforart.com has a terrific range of affordable artwork from 24 talented artists from all over the world. If you see an artwork that you like, click on that little thumb and give it a vote. The artwork that receives the most votes gets promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors (well, perhaps hundreds) to see.

We're doing a lot of the printing behind this venture - Ben has taken advantage of our very popular Store And Print service where we keep a copy of your file here on our server and make prints to order as required without you needing to re-prepare and re-deliver the files each time. And of course the prints are being made on some of our lovely archival papers like Crane Portfolio Rag and the venerable Photo Rag.

Jeremy's Corner

We've settled into our new offices at 95 Howard St now, and things seem to be running reasonably smoothly again after the initial chaos of the move. We've got a lot more room now, so we're keeping more stock and we're able to do training and so forth much more easily. We've also got a new person on board, who is sitting at our new front desk. Her name is Kylie, and we trust you'll make her welcome as she comes up to speed with the large variety of products and services we offer. She's learning fast and should bring new efficiency to the retail side of our business, as well as help us out with all the day to day office tasks.

We've just finished many, many prints for the Art Show and the APPA awards, and we wish all of you entering the shows many sales and much success with your work! We've seen some really fantastic stuff come through this year, it's quite clear that the overall level of comfort with digital techniques is rising rapidly - it's also a relief so see less formulaic work than in past years with the heavily vignetted, over processed look so popular just a year or two ago quickly falling out of favour (and not a moment too soon if you ask me - if there's one theme lately it's that work has been more cheerful than the last year or two - I've had several clients claim this is an effect of the 'KRudd' tornado!). Whether or not that change in tastes makes it through to the the actual judging remains to be seen, of course!

My Monitor Upgrade and getting down to some serious soft proofing!

As mentioned above I have recently upgraded my monitor from an Eizo S2110W to an Eizo CG241W. I was not expecting a big functional change, I really just bought the screen so that I could give proper demonstrations to client's interested in the technology. But I've been stunned at what I can now achieve, and what I am now seeing, with this amazing screen. (And all of this amazing technology is available in the new incredibyl cheap CG222W as well now!).

I have spent some real time exploring hardware based soft proofing and I'm finding it to be a very effective process. Typically soft proofing is performed by using a printer profile which contains information about the black point (d-max) of a particular printing system. This is used by Photoshop to re-map the blacks from your monitors black point to the print's black point. What results is the display of a low contrast simulation on an inherently high contrast device - as monitors always have a much higher contrast ratio than prints. My CG241W monitor, for example, can display images at an 850:1 contrast ratio. The best prints, made on long tonal range papers, never exceed about 250:1 contrast ratio (and 200:1 or less is typical). So this means my monitor natively displays imagery with over 4 times the the amount of contrast than my best prints can ever express. So when I soft proof, I am asking my eye to accept a sudden drop in contrast from 850:1 to 200:1. And as anyone who has done this process knows - this is a very difficult process for the eye to adapt to. (The process of an advanced soft proof is detailed here). Various tricks are employed to reduce this difficulty for the eye, such as hiding all the photoshop palettes and setting the screen to a neutral mid tone grey, but it's never completely successful in my experience.

One of the major things an Eizo CG screen brings to the table is the ability to manipulate the contrast ratio of an LCD screen without huge unpleasant side effects, and with measured accuracy. With an Eizo CG screen, you can use Eizo's excellent and very easy to use ColorNavigator software to control your monitors black point and set a specific contrast ratio as desired - for example 200:1. And because of the fantastic high bit depth circuitry in the Eizo monitor, this adjustment is carried out without visible side effects (try this same adjustment on a typical Dell or Apple etc screen and you will immediately induce huge banding in your greyscale gradients). So at the end of the process you are left with your monitor displaying the exact contrast ratio you require - you can even input a measured paper white point and set the white point of your monitor to that of your paper so the entire display is adjusted to be as close as possible match to your final output medium! This is an amazing piece of technology that takes soft proofing and colour management to a whole new level. Indeed, if you use multiple papers, you can create multiple 'hardware based soft proofs' for your papers and dynamically flick between them at the click of a mouse using ColorNavigator. It's pretty amazing stuff and because the eye does not have to go through a huge contrast adjustment when you turn on soft proofing, it makes the whole process far, far easier. And this means more accurate prints - and that's the goal, after all.

Another thing I have noticed about my new screen is how amazingly even it is, across its entire field of display. Because the screen area is so large I regularly have more than one image up at a time, or more commonly two views on the same image (for example, I will have one view displaying the whole image and another view zoomed into the area I am retouching). The two views on the file match exactly in both density and colour terms - no matter where they are on the screen. It's uncanny. Try this same thing on an iMac, for example, and you'll quickly see that the screen varies quite visibly in both density and colour on either side of the monitor. The monitor actually came with an individual measurement sheet showing that across it's entire field there is essentially no visible difference in both colour and density...very impressive stuff as that was perhaps the one real complaint I had with my older S2110W which did have some variance across its field (still way better than most screens, though!).

There's another common problem we encounter here - I must be asked about this several times a week - that of the overly bright monitor. Lots of recently released monitors can not control their brightness levels properly - with many of them being in excess of 200 candelas bright even when set to their minimum brightness. This is a ludicrous figure if paper is the thing you're trying to simulate. All this light flooding through your images will make you feel like your images are much brighter than they really are, and when you print them you will find them too dark. It's very easily solved - as long as your monitor can reach a sensible brightness figure and hold it consistently - again an area where the Eizo monitors excel. It's also just much less straining on your eyes to work in front of a monitor set to a reasonable brightness level (80 to 130 candelas are the typical values most people calibrate to).

A Quick Discussion On Shadow Detail

One thing I am often asked is why can't I easily see differentiation between RGB 15,15,15 and RGB 0,0,0 on my custom profiled printer?

Well, the first thing to realise is often that you can see this difference, but only when you print substantial areas of these tones and only when they are near each other and only when they are not surrounded by white. The human eye is particularly bad at seeing difference in dark tones when they are surrounded by white - and this is an easily testable fact. Make a print of a very dark grey tone - say RGB 30,30,30 - on a small piece of paper. Now make two small frames, one from bright white paper and one from black card. Place them immediately around your print and then swap between the two frames - you'll see your grey tone change brightness levels right in front of your eyes - it's quite hard to believe at first. There is also a famous picture which shows just how big a difference surrounding tones can have on our perception of a colour. Pretty amazing, huh? So - one thing to try is your printer test again, but cut all the white paper around the edge off and do your patches at a much bigger size. You may well see that the difference you thought wasn't there actually is!

The second reason may be simply that you're using a very cheap printing device that is really quite bad at shadow detail. A profile will go some way to helping this but profiles are good at small nudges, not huge sweeping corrections, so it may be that your printer just isn't up to the job. And if you're printing with the relative colorimetric intent (rather than perceptual), you are pretty much asking Photoshop to clip your shadow detail - try printing again with the perceptual intent and you should see in most cases much better shadow detail (more about this here).

The third reason may be your choice of working RGB space. Most photographers in Australia use AdobeRGB and with good reason as it is an excellent general purpose colour space. However, it has quite a significant compression to its shadows - more so than some other colour spaces. You can check this by creating a white to black gradient in Photoshop and then running your mouse over it with your info set to LAB mode. You will see from this that AdobeRGb is not visually linear in deep shadows - you have to go all the way up to RGB 25,25,25 to get to LAB 5 - or put simply you are numerically about 10% along the scale when in visual terms you are only at 5% of the scale. That is, there is not a lot of correlation between the AdobeRGB numbers and what we might expect - you would think that if we moved 10% up the scale in numbers, we'd move the same amount in brightness - but we don't. It's an easy trap and although your monitor profile should be sorting this out for you and placing everything in the appropriate spot visually, it tends to be an area where both cheaper calibrators and cheaper monitors are weak. So often, on your monitor, the light flowing through these parts of your image will make them look significantly brighter than these areas are going to look in print - even the most accurate print in the world. Does this mean AdobeRGB is a bad colour space? No, it just means that you need to be more careful with placing shadow detail in AdobeRGB than in, say, sRGB. And if you're testing a printer using a printer test file, you should make sure it's been properly designed for the colour space it is in - most of them are not. The PDI printer test file on our downloads page is quite good.

The final thing to look at is your lighting - printer profiles are built to simulate D50 lighting at a whopping level of brightness (2000 Lux if I recall correctly). This is *very* bright light. So when assessing your prints/profiles, make sure you are looking at them under a bright lights (a solux bulb in a couple of lamps is perfect - notes on how to set this up here). If you're under typical room lights at night, you will simply not be seeing shadow detail that is most likely easily visible under a brighter light.

 

That's it!

Cheers, hope life is treating you very well indeed, and hope to see you soon,

Jeremy and Amy Daalder

Directors,

Image Science

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