I recently visited Quato in Germany as part of the process of The Colour Collective becoming a reseller of their monitors. We have been reselling colour critical displays from EIZO and NEC for many years and I’ve been involved previously with older marques such as Barco and PressView but still I was very impressed with Quato as a company and their products. It is rare in these days of mass manufacture to find a company producing small numbers of high quality products to very exacting standards.

Quato only produce a few thousand screens a year. They are produced in factory in Taiwan that is shared between Quato and several medical monitor manufacturers so the very high standard of quality assurance are used. When it arrives in Germany each screen is checked by hand. It is warmed up and calibrated and only passed for sale if it passes very stringent uniformity tests – much tighter than their competitors. If the screen drifts out of uniformity during its life it can go back to Germany for readjustment. Their dead pixel policy is very good as well. They guarantee no sub-pixel failures in the centre of the screen and no more than 2 or 3, depending on the model, over the rest of the screen.

Their iColor Display software that calibrates the software is packed full of useful features including the UGRA UDACT software for checking that the calibration and uniformity conforms to elements of ISO 12646 and the requirements of printing standards organizations such as FOGRA. It is also unusual in that it will calibrate not only Quato displays via the hardware connection but also other displays via software calibration, enabling both a main and palette monitor to be profiled by the same software for example. They bundle the X-Rite DTP94 with iColor Display because they have found it to be the most reliable device and X-Rite manufacture it specially for them. The companies active participation in many industry bodies such as FOGRA and the ICC is a measure of their commitment to colour science and quality.They also produce print profiling software that they claim is far more accurate than others. I’ll be testing that soon.

If you are looking for absolutely the best colour critical monitors on the market and need very high degrees of colour accuracy for soft-proofing or retouching then you should certainly consider a Quato. Such quality doesn’t come without a corresponding price tag though so these screens aren’t for everyone but as I said if you need to go that one step further in search of colour excellence then Quato could be the answer.

You can purchase Quato monitors in the UK from our online partner, Native Digital.

Come and visit us in Hall 11,  stand F222 at IPEX from May 18th – 25th at the NEC, Birmingham.

We’ll be showing the latest versions of the ProofMaster and PrintFactory RIPs by FourPees, along with Quato monitors.

You can register your attendance at IPEX here.

For a long time I’ve mentioned when training that colour management is a form of quality assurance. You don’t recalibrate to profile a device because you think it’s inaccurate. You test, re-calibrate and profile the device regularly so you know it’s not inaccurate. Colour management should not be used to fix problems but to prevent them. I recently was asked to join an ISO 9001 with 12647 auditors course and had the opportunity to learn a lot more about quality systems and came to realise how well colour management fits into them.

ISO 9001 is a long standing quality management system standard and the BPIF (British Printing Industries Federation) are formulating a new standard that links ISO9001 with ISO12647, the printing press standard, to allow companies to be certified by internationally recognised bodies as being able to print to ISO 12647 and have the supporting quality systems in place to ensure both conformity to the standard and customer satisfaction.

Colour management should not be used to fix problems but to prevent them – Rob Griffith

I was slightly dubious about 9001 before the course. The pre-press and design companies I worked for before joining The Colour Collective were all very small and didn’t have very much in the way of formalised systems and procedures. Some of the ISO standards have a poor reputation as being more about ticking the right boxes than actually changing how companies work.

However as the course went on I realised that the majority of the standard was common sense; learning from mistakes and ensuring they don’t happen again, focusing on customer satisfaction, having procedures in place that make it hard for human error to occur, making sure management is fully behind delivering quality products and services and always trying to get better and better at whatever the company does should be at the heart of any organisation.

Any design, pre-press or print company has a series of interlocking procedures that feed the work from receipt of the customer’s files or instructions through to a finished piece of print etc. The interfaces between one department and another is where error usually occurs. Do sales get the right instructions from the customer? Does production check that all the right fonts have been included? Does the press operator check that the print matches the proof? Looking at the processes in your business and building quality checks into them is a sure way to reduce errors , have more satisfied customers and increase profits.

Certainly any printing company that aims to print to the very tight specifications of ISO 12647 needs very good quality systems in place. However, they shouldn’t go for ISO9001 certification just to put another logo on their website and tick the right boxes for their customers. They should do it because they want to produce great print every time. They need to retain the passion of print as a craft but unite that passion with the control of a 21st century manufacturing process.

I aim to start auditing ISO 9001 with 12647 systems soon and also get involved with consultancy work helping printing companies and others, achieve the standard not so that they can tick the boxes and get a 9001 certificate but so they can raise their quality levels and exceed their customer’s expectations.

Rob Griifth
The Colour Collective Ltd

Our own testing shows that both the Eye-One series (Eye-One Display LT, Eye-One Display 2 and Eye-One Pro) along with the Spyder3 (Spyder3PRO and Spyder3Elite) will work just fine, although there are some issues with the X-Rite DTP 94 (aka Monaco Optix XR).

The DTP94 was officially discontinued by X-Rite a few years ago, just after their merger with GretagMacbeth, however it has still been available as an OEM product from some sources, although X-Rite themselves have no longer been officially providing software upgrades (which has led to some issues with new operating systems such as Windows Vista).

Despite the fact that the DTP94 is still regarded by some as one of the best devices of it’s kind, it can struggle with TFT displays that exceed 100% Adobe RGB gamut, such as the latest version of the NEC SpectraView Reference 2690. There is a work-around or ‘fudge’ as it’s technically called – get in contact if you want to know more.

For more information on our testing results with calibrators, check out this article here.

For more information or to buy an Eye-One Display, click here. For Spyder3 information, click here.

If you find that you are always doing the same tweaks to every shot then it could be a sign that the built in profile isn’t working very well for you. What DNG Profile Editor allows you to do is to tweak the built-in profiles to suit your own camera and preferences. It also allows you to build a new profile from a shot of a Macbeth Color Checker (converted to Adobe’s DNG format).

The new profile is then saved and is accessible in ACR or Lightroom. In my own quick test I shot the Macbeth under daylight on my D70, built a profile and then applied to a shot of my daughter I took a few months ago. The result was a definite improvement in colour saturation and accuracy versus the standard ACR 4.4 profile.

Downloading DNG Profile Editor and using a Macbeth Colorchecker could make a significant increase in the accuracy of your shots and also decrease the time it takes to process your RAW files.

To download the free (unsupported) application, go here:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles:Editor

For information or to buy a ColorChecker chart, go here:
http://www.nativedigital.co.uk/shop/product.php/44/macbeth-colour-checker-chart-v1

Doing what I do for a living can be a curse. I can’t flick through a magazine without looking at the quality of the repro and print, I can’t walk past an ad on the tube without peering closely at the dots. Needless to say local newspapers get recycled and not read due to the appalling quality of most of the images. It drives my wife nuts. Imagine my mutterings and chunterings when we had a new LCD TV delivered and the colour was a bit off. I was pausing DVDs and fiddling in the picture settings menus with the myriad of controls until I thought I had made an improvement. My wife put up with it for a day or so but my three year old son objected, loudly, to having Lightning McQueen’s adventures interrupted because his dad didn’t think he was quite the right hue of red. There was only one thing for it, the TV would have to be calibrated.

The Spyder3 TV uses the same colorimeter as the Spyder3 Elite or Pro systems but the big difference is that it comes with a DVD of test patterns that you play as you adjust the colours on the screen. You need a laptop close to the TV, of course. The software starts by asking you what type of TV you have (it will do them all, even projectors), and then what controls it has – Brightness, Contrast, Colour Temperature and Tint etc. You then have to show one of the test patterns, take a measurement with the colorimeter and then adjust the TV and measure again. There is a lot of juggling the remotes for your TV and DVD player and it took about 40 minutes but the improvement was considerable.

The only weakness is that my TV had more controls than the Spyder3 TV adjusted so I wasn’t sure what values to leave those that weren’t included at but opted to leave them at the defaults. The colour still wasn’t perfect but it was in the ball park and all I felt I needed to do was to adjust the red slightly to get the fleshtones a bit better.

I’d also like to know what standard I’m adjusting the TV to, presumably some TV industry standard. There is a professional level software from Datacolor called ColorFacts that is aimed at the broadcast industry and now I’ve dipped my toe into TV calibration I can see it as being a possible addition to our list of services.

Find out more about Spyder3TV and buy online here:

http://www.nativedigital.co.uk/shop/product.php/716/spyder3tv

August is usually a good month for me in that, because of holidays etc, I have less site visits for training or consultancy and so I can actually clear the back log of testing and research jobs I’ve been promising myself I’ll do all year. One such job is trying to come up with an answer to the above question, one I get asked very frequently. To get an answer I used my LaCie 324 monitor and the BlueEye Pro software that comes with it, and a Spyder3, a i1 Display 2 and an i1 Pro. I used the BlueEye software and not the Datacolor or X-Rite software in each case to make sure I was only testing the calibration hardware and not the very different approaches the different software takes to monitor calibration.

Each calibration and profile was then tested in three ways. Firstly with the BlueEye Pro’s own test and report function, secondly with BabelColor’s Patch Tool and then lastly with some visual evaluation in Photoshop and a series of test files.

The results from the first test were very interesting. Any built-in reporting tool in a monitor calibration system typically displays some RGB colours, calculates what the profile that has just been created indicates should be the colour reproduced (in the Lab colour space) and then measures the colour actually output. It can then calculate a Delta E value – a measurement of colour difference – and hence give you and indication of how accurate the profile is (for those technically minded I used the Delta E 94 equation). The results from this first test are below:

As you can see the Spyder3 produced the worst figures, and the i1 Display 2 the best. Also the report includes a graph of the colour gamut of the profile and that of the Syder3 was significantly smaller.

The weakness of the internal test and report function with any monitor calibration software is that it is only testing the profile against itself, not any external standard. So for the next test I used some software from BabelColor called PatchTool and tested the profiles ability to display a series of 72 colours in the ISO Coated v2 CMYK press colour space. The results are below.

This time the Spyder3 got the better result. In each case the max dE values were typically in the dark neutral colours.

The last test I did was based around the good old mark one eyeball, all the numbers in the world are useless if when you actually start looking at images you are not happy with the results. For each profile I looked at three files in Photoshop – a gradation from black to white, concentric squares of very dark blacks varying from around 25, 25, 25 RGB to 0,0,0 RGB, and my own Colour Collective Test Form image. With the i1 Display 2 calibration active all three looked OK. The gradation was generally neutral with only a hint of colour creeping in here and there and not very much banding. I could see most of the black squares and the test image looked good. The i1 Pro results were slightly worse with some reasonably obvious colour in the gradation and noticeable steps in the shadows. I could see less of the squares and there was an obvious green cast. That green cast could also be seen on the shadows of the test form. The Spyder3 profile looked by far the worst. In the gradation there were marked steps in the shadows and a severe green cast. Only a few black squares were distinguishable and they were very green, and test form looked a bit over saturated and one of the model’s black dresses looked dark green.

Of course these results are based on one monitor, one calibration application and three individual sensors and the results on other monitors and sensors could be different. You might be surprised that the i1 Pro did so badly but spectrophotometers can have trouble reading very low levels of emitted light, and are more prone to variation, and also to be fair my own i1 Pro is a  Rev A – the first version – and later versions were improved. Another factor you have to evaluate when comparing calibration systems is the ease of use of the included software. Here the X-Rite systems are also a clear winner. The DataColor software I find confusing to use sometimes whereas the Eye-One Match software gives users a nice and easy step by step interface.

And the winner is…

So, which Monitor Calibrator is best? I would have to say the i1 Display 2.

After nearly ten years in colour management there aren’t many things I haven’t profiled. Printing onto cermaics, fabrics, plastics, metals can all be profiled to give better results but of course they do cause more problems than conventional media.

This week I visited a company I have been to before that seem to delight in giving me something new to profile. I have previously colour managed their fabric printing with great success and this has meant they now call me in whenever they get a new system in. This time as well as re-profiling a dye sublimation fabric printing system as part of a regular maintenance agreement I was going to tackle their new leather printing system.

Calibrating and profiling unusual media isn’t really very different to profiling more conventional media, you go through the same stages, but you just have to aware of the potential measuring errors and reduced colour gamut issues that may occur. Since both the fabric and leather printing systems were based on wide format inkjets driven by a popular RIP it wasn’t too challenging a day. With any RIP you always start with some form of linearisation and ink channel limiting, then move onto defining a total ink limit before outputting a profiling chart, building and then testing the profile.

The leather system was tackled first. I had requested to start on this system with a white leather but it hadn’t arrived so I had to work with tan leather. Obviously leather being an organic material is going to vary from cow to cow and with the tanning process so complete colour accuracy was always going to be difficult but the customer was experienced enough to realise this. I can’t go into any detail about the kit the customer was using as it is commercially sensitive.

I quickly realised that I would have to limit the inks quite harshly to stop the ink puddling on the leather, this would reduce the colour gamut but could not be avoided. After running through the linearisation and ink limiting routines on the RIP I then output multiple profiling test charts and measured them in using my EyeOne Pro. I was using multiple charts over several hides to try and take account of any differences in the colour of the leather, I have found the EyeOne Pro to be very good at measuring odd media since it can measure any thickness. All the readings were averaged and then the profile created. Looking at the profile in ColorThink I could see the colour space was quite good, just offset from the neutral because of the colour of the leather. I loaded the profile into the RIP and then output some test images, and the customer was delighted.

I then quickly did the fabric system, this is prints with dye sublimation inks onto paper and this is then heat pressed on to the cloth and the ink transfers. I am used to dealing with this process now after a few years of similar customers so I know I can get a good profile, the key is to uses a lot of black in the neutrals to get a good greyscale images since they often produce canvases for landscape photographers using this process.

The customer was very happy with the consistency of print from the very different media and their customer, a fashion house, will now be using the leather printing process to print wallets and bags, to go with the fabric bags our customer already produces for them.

For further information, or if you are interested in us profiling printers and different materials for you, please contact us.

© 2008 The Colour Collective Ltd

Come along and see us on the ‘Native Digital’ stand and check out the latest Eizo monitors as well as X-Rite colour management equipment too.

DPI will provide pro-photographers and the whole photographic industry a knowledge-based event where they can see and try the currently creative, the productively profitable and the just plain useful and interesting-to-know solutions and services in digital imaging.

BJP Conference Series
DPI also features the BJP Conference Series that will showcase notable speakers to look at important topics facing the photographic market in 90 minute sessions. DPI’s busy seminar programme will present 40-minute sessions on the latest products and solutions so that visitors can get first-hand expert advice and then visit the exhibition area for more hands-on experience.

Adobe Theatre
The DPI show features an Adobe Theatre that will present Adobes latest products for the photographic market. Presenters Terry Steeley and Robin Preston head a great line-up of speakers that will provide all the latest tips and tricks for all those in the digital imaging market.

Apple Solutions Expert Theatre
It also features an Apple Solutions Expert hands on theatre that will allow a free quality training opportunity on the great new Apple application Aperture 2.0 and the Live Studio and Workflow feature will show all the steps from image capture to providing successful large-format output.

Also exhibiting at DPI are Hasselblad, Canon, Adobe, Apple Solutions Experts, HP, OnOne, Wacom, Republik Agency and many more.

The DPI show is FREE to attend if you pre-register for tickets (otherwise, tickets are £12 on the door). Visit the DPI website for further information and to pre-register for tickets.

http://www.dpishow.com/

I always enjoy working with Museums, it is fascinating to look behind the scenes and see things the public never do. The maze of corridors lined with collections and rows of bookshelves with obscure leather bound volumes go on for miles.

The British Museum has been a regular customer since we did project colour managing their Photographic department a few years ago. Last week I visited the Coins & Medals department, not an obvious candidate for colour management perhaps but since I have been doing colour management for nearly ten years now I have learnt that all kinds of people see a need for colour accuracy.

The Coins & Medals team were using an Epson Expression 10000XL flatbed scanner to scan some of their collection of 80,000 bank notes and coins and had bought from us a copy of X-Rite’s ProfileMaker Scanner Module, a couple of IT8 targets and an X-Rite EyeOne Display 2 for monitor calibration.

Once I had negotiated the vault-like entrance to the department I worked with the IS department to install the software and do some initial training and testing. We had to enable local admin rights on the PC to enable ProfileMaker to create and save the profiles into the correct Windows directory. Getting the IT/IS department on side is always needed in this type of project since they have to both understand the procedures and the reasons for varying from sometimes strict security policies, and also be the first line of support for the users.

The Epson scanner driver is very easy to profile because it has a No Colour Correction setting in the configuration dialogue that ensures that all current profiles and automatic adjustments are disabled, and this is very necessary when profiling scanners. The monitor was a standard Dell, not my first choice for colour accuracy, but the EyeOne Display did a good job of calibrating and profiling it. The initial tests went well and we were soon able to scan some bank notes and get a good representation on screen. As usual I checked out the Photoshop settings and asked the department some questions about how the images would be used to determine the best RGB colour space to be used. In this case since the images were going into the same database as the images from the Photographic department Adobe RGB was the best choice to ensure that all images in the database were in the same colour space. The Epson scanner driver also makes it easy to apply a scanner profile and convert to a working space as each scan is done.

After lunch we started the user training with four members of the department. Given that none of them were that familiar with scanning or working with images on a computer I kept the level of the training very simple. I showed them how to calibrate and profile the monitor and then got a couple of them to try, and then did the same with the scanner profiling. I made sure they kept notes and referred to them as they tried it out to make sure they made sense. After a couple of hours I was happy they had got to grips with it. I then made them all do a  few scans to ensure that they were getting the results they needed.

During the testing I was able to help them with questions like what resolution they should be scanning to, whether they should sharpen images and to show them the Levels tool in Photoshop. Using the white point picker on the white background of the scanner to get a good dynamic range in the images, since bank notes often don’t have a natural white point of their own. Customers outside of the Graphics industry often pick my brains in this way since I am often the first contact with anybody experienced in professional image reproduction, even those in the Graphics industry benefit from a different viewpoint, both from my own end user experience of graphic design and repro and my years of going on site to customers and see different ways of approaching the same problems.

At the end of the day the users were all very happy they were getting great reproductions of the notes with very little effort, now if we could get a colour accurate printer in their with the right paper they could really start making some money…

Rob