Colour profiles & the Mac

[SlinkyMike]

I often I tweak the colours in my pitchas on my MBP, I'm sure most people do the same - I dont have a well defined workflow so I'll use either Aperture, iPhoto or Photshop depending on my mood and how much time I want to spend.

Once I get an image to the point where it's 'Goldilocks' I'll often email it to someone or pop it on a flash drive and take a gander on the flatpanel in the lounge, seeing a pic you took and tweaked displayed in 42" of LCD goodness can give one a warm n fuzzy feeling inside.

Only thing is the colours often look totally different!

I know that the Mac uses a different profile and I have googled it but most of the explanations/ suggestions have been fairly lenghty and/or over my head.

What is a simple way to get your post processed photos to 'travel' (to use an audio production expression) i.e.: Look the same no matter where you view it and most importantly once its printed?

This did come up in the HDR thread where I posted pics I had taken and the Firefox 'gfx.color_management.enabled ' setting came up but this does'nt help when others are viewing it say on Flikr or when its printed (am I mistaken about the printing issue - I am undecided after looking at prints and comparing to the screen.)

 

[bwana]

Safari renders colours properly but it not much use unless your monitor is calibrated and to do that you need a colorimeter. You can try and convince yourself that you can do it without one but you're not going to get accurate colours.

I use the Spyder Express to calibrate all my macs including the Mini that drives my plasma.

 

[SlinkyMike]

Safari renders colours properly but it not much use unless your monitor is calibrated and to do that you need a colorimeter. You can try and convince yourself that you can do it without one but you're not going to get accurate colours.

I use the Spyder Express to calibrate all my macs including the Mini that drives my plasma.

You mentioned Spyder Express in the HDR thread - checked it on Amazon, price is ouchy.

So there is no simple answer then?
Really what I was hoping for was a menubar item that I could click to say: "look like other stuff" and the click again to say: "look cool again" naivete sucks at times.

Incidentally: Your mac mini->PPC or Intel and if PPC does Frontrow run ok?

 

[SubliminalThought]

From what I understand about colour profiling is that there needs to be a common base. You can profile your monitors to the base that the labs use (some fuji standard I think) and then what you see on screen will come out printed correctly.

The problem of taking the picture to other equipment is that the 'other' equipment is uncalibrated and therefore depending on where you view it the colours will look different. Of course, if the other equipment is calibrated and your applications on them is colour aware then they should look very similar (there is some error margin and drifting).

 

[bwana]

Incidentally: Your mac mini->PPC or Intel and if PPC does Frontrow run ok?

First gen intel - core duo - and it runs frontrow perfectly.

 

[SlinkyMike]

From what I understand about colour profiling is that there needs to be a common base. You can profile your monitors to the base that the labs use (some fuji standard I think) and then what you see on screen will come out printed correctly.

The problem of taking the picture to other equipment is that the 'other' equipment is uncalibrated and therefore depending on where you view it the colours will look different. Of course, if the other equipment is calibrated and your applications on them is colour aware then they should look very similar (there is some error margin and drifting).

Its enough to make one switch to chemical. I'm no pro but a print is useless to me unless it looks liek how I made it look (and all the time, effort and equipment that went into doing that is wasted too...)

First gen intel - core duo - and it runs frontrow perfectly.

Sweet - awesome media centre!
I have been wanting to do this for a while now: replace old dvd player with a Mini; attach all external drives and connect to WLAN; bluetooth mouse and keyboard on the coffee table.
Now I can stream media to anywhere in the house and watch all my movie and series 'backups' straight up (I currently have a hugely convoluted system for doing that) plus I can rock youtube stright on mah telly and with a combination of the remote app for iphone and airport express I can control tunes in different zones throughout the house.

All totally wicked apart from the hefty pricetag on the newer Mini which is why I was wondering if the (cheaper) PPC version would do but I'm guessing your core duo is probably quite near the lower limit.

 

[bwana]

All totally wicked apart from the hefty pricetag on the newer Mini which is why I was wondering if the (cheaper) PPC version would do but I'm guessing your core duo is probably quite near the lower limit.

Koffie should be able to tell you - he had the last of the PPC ones iirc.