Digital BW, The Print

On Aug 28, 2012, at 1:28 PM, "Mark" <mark@...> wrote:

> I understand, but as much of a believer as I am in color managed workflows, I've never quite gotten the point of building camera-specific profiles, even when dealing with very specific scene illumination conditions for real=world subject matter (fine art repro is another matter).

I certainly was a believer in display and output profiling long before I moved into capture calibration. For a long time, users asked me for ICC profiles for their cameras, but when I looked at the issues they were thinking of as solvable that way, partly because an ICC profile is just not the right tool for caturem but also because almost all of problems were white balance and exposure related, which are not camera profile issues, they are scene lighting issues. So the first capture tool I developed was the SpyderCube, which solves those scene issues nicely. But once that was out there, it became clear there as a second, subtler, set of issues that really were at the camera level. So I experimented with targets, DNG profiles, and other calibration methods, and determined that I could reduce camera color error and difference between cameras a fair amount with a color target-based calibration. So over the last couple of years I've been working on that type of workflow, developing methods that work for various types of photography based on such tools, and I'm pretty comfortable with it now. 

I still see a lot of knowledgable shooters who wouldn't dream of using uncalibrated displays, or making trial-and-error prints, but who are not convinced by the value of capture calibration tools. I guess thats my new frontier� fitting those tools into the ever-changing RAW workflows.

C. David Tobie
Global Product Technology Manager

Datacolor
5 Princess Road
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA
609.924.2189
www.datacolor.com

Phone: 207.685.9248
Mobile: 207.312.0448
Fax: 207.685.4455
Email:  cdtobie@...
Skype: cdtobie



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