cel
Posts: 794
Joined: 7/30/2005
From: Seattle, WA
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A snip of some dialogue I have in nates regarding calibration/gamma etc. You could study this junk for years and still just scratch the surface. The only sure way is to download the picture and view it in an image editing program with the appropriate color management enabled throughout the imaging chain - scanner to monitor. Mac screens have a Gamma of 1.72 and PC screens have a Gamma of 2.53 (no it's not 2.2 as everyone assumes) so if you apply the difference .81 in a - or a + to the appropriate file you should see the effect on your screen of a cross platform transfer.
first of all, unless everyone is working on an accurately calibrated and profiled monitor, every image on every monitor will look different, sometimes significantly.<P>To accurately calibrate and profile a monitor, currently there is no alternative to using a separate hardware (colorimeter) + software package like the ones offered by Colorvision, monaco, Gretag-Macbeth, or the proprietary ones for the Sony Artisan, LaCie & Barco monitors. neither apple's built in Color sync or Adobe's Gamma software only tools will do it because they rely solely on the viewers eye to guess at accurate gray scales, gamma (contrast range slope), & colors. The human eye and brain, is a marvelous perceptual system, that has a prime strength of flexibility and adaptability. That strength unfortunately is a weakness when it comes to calibrating and adjusting a monitor to a fixed standard. Your color perception can be affected by: ambient light in the room you are working in, the physical setting of the monitor, the viewer's age, the time of day, the health and condition of the viewer's eyes and brain, and many other factors.<P>This complicates the fact that every individual monitor has a different color 'signature" -- the way it interprets the signal sent to it by the image processing system of your computer.<P>Zeroes and Ones.<P>All digital images, like everything done by your computer, consists of zeroes and ones. Each image --whether digital or analog --has it's own colorspace encoded. To put it crudely, how a particular device --camera, scanner, monitor and printer/paper/ink combination -- creates or interprets these zeroes and ones are a large part of what is also known as the "colorspace" of each device. This is how the device interprets the data in the image file. What the profiling process does is to create a test image run it through the device and then using an external tool called a colorimeter) measures the analog output of the device you are using and converts those results back to digital form and compares that set of data to the data fed into the device, The software notes where the output is different from the input and creates an individual "profile" which tweaks the data being fed to the device so that what is displayed is an accurate rendition of the of the underlying data.<P>Why profiling is important. <P>Profiles are really what David Blatner and Bruce Fraser in <B>Real World Adobe Photoshop 7</B> call "translators". if you don't make an accurate translation from the original image file to the monitor's colorspace, how can you ever hope , except by wasting a lot of time and materials, to get an accurate print -- or more to the point of your question Lutz, a accurate interpretation from one operating system platform to another? Or even from one monitor to another using the same computer? My wife works n a Dell PC using windows 98. I use an Apple G4 running OS x (10.2.6) I have used Colorvision's PhotoCAL and Spyder , calibration and profiling toolset to profile both of our monitors. I do this about every two weeks. Both monitor's display images identically. <P>Bottom line:<P>The best you can do is accurately calibrate and profile your monitor and hope and pray that whoever is viewing the image on their system is also using a calibrated and accurately profiled monitor on their system.
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RE: Considering a Wacom... - 
I'm not changing sides OR hanging up my brushes.. just gonna use the brushes less frequently, but with more purpose. Someone I met through MySpace expressed the opinion that one medium would, in fact, enhance the use of the other. I think she might be right about that. 
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