Day 2 - Pro Graphics - Screen It Like You Mean It!

Thursday of the 2-Day sale concentrates on the Screens of Our Lives...the monitors that show us the images our cameras take.

Camera Electronics sells only the best - EIZO - and there are at least five of the darn things on the Thursday special advertisement. They carry some healthy cash-backs from the manufacturers to further reduce the price. All the more reason to finally do what you know is going to make your images look and print better.

BTW, there are also smaller items on screaming specials - Colormunki and Spyder Elite 5 screen calibrators, for instance. And the bargain of the day - the Datacolor Spydercheckr 24 small colour chart.

If you are currently editing your pictures on a 1965 Astor television salvaged from the tip, please come in and see the EIZOs and the ancillary equipment. We can promise you a better view of the world.

Why Are Some K's OK And Some K's Are Not OK?

Because not all K's are created equal. OK?

You all know about the Kelvin scale of colour temperature measurement - named after Lord Kelvin - that measures the relative redness, orangeness, yellowness, blueness, and  eventual whiteness of light and strings it out on a numerical scale. The scale starts at 1, which is the colour and intensity of a mechanic's fingernails and goes to 10,000 which is he whiteness of sunlight as you come off a three-day bender and someone throws the window blinds open. I suspect Kelvin also had a scale for the screams as well.

Well, a lot of cameras skirt around this question by having automatic white balance programs in their software that measures the light, quantifies it on the Kelvin scale, and then gives you whatever the heck it wants to. If you include a dominant colour in your composition, it sometimes agrees with you and renders it accurately and sometimes argues the case by tipping the white balance over the other way to compensate for what it thinks is your error. If you are easily persuaded, you go along with it. Hey, it may not be science but it might be art...

If you are pedantic and scientific and people have started to get wise to your pictures of snowdrifts that look like a sort of a dirty peach colour*, you override the manufacturer's opinion and set the white balance yourself...by following the manufacturer's preset WB options. Now you can get a light blue or green snow drift. If you snow drift is lit by a fluorescent tube you can get just anything...

Determination is the thing. Your camera probably has a custom setting for the white balance in graded steps of Kelvin degrees. Find it in the menu next to the pet smile option and dial in 5000ºK. If you are out in fictitious sunlight at 11:00 in the morning with the sun to your back and a chocolate-box landscape stretched out in front of you you will probably get a reasonable balance. Likewise if you are in a studio with a studio flash popping away at a X-Rite colour card held by someone who is a neutral colour themselves...you'll get something recognisable.

But - modify that old sunlight with cloud, haze, chemtrails**, or advancing hours and it will get red or blue or orange or whatever - also if you are shooting in the studio you may discover that your beloved strobe units don't fire at 5000ºK.

I know - My studio lights fire at 5300ºK. Not a big difference, but enough to throw off some grey backdrops and some delicate colours. When I noted this happening I conducted a long test and look day and finally got the right number. I have it dialled in on a custom setting on the Fujifilm cameras and the whole thing now works a treat.

If you can't afford a big X-rite or an old McBeth chart get a Spyder ColorCheckr24 and make that do - you'll be glad you did in the end.

* Note peach coloured snow was common as winter wore on in Alberta. And there were worse colours as well...

** When I was a kid our chemtrails were maple syrup...

Smile - You Can Make Your Computer Behave With Colormunki

I have no idea how to colour manage my computer. Aside from wiping the screen with a rag dipped in coal oil and making sure the ants are shaken out of the keyboard, I just depend on the colorimeter module that I plug into a USB port to do it for me.

Well, here's one from the X-Rite people that will do the same for you. it is a simple thing to use - load the software into your monitor, follow the prompts , set it to work on the screen in a  darkened room, and reap the rewards of simple calibration.

At the very least it will pt your screen to the same colour every time it is operated - I recommend once every two months - and it is like sobering up on a fine morning.

Legless Lou And The Spyder Checkr

I have just added the Silkypix 6 program to my system and decided to take the opportunity to test out the correlation between the Elinchrom studio flash, Fujifilm speed light, and the Fujifilm cameras. It is not that I mistrust or misunderstand what they do - but I am aware that flash tubes and soft box diffusers change with time, and that sometimes the white balance results can be off enough to make later processing a nuisance.

Of course, like all RAW process programs, the Silkypix will allow a considerable degree of white balance change in the file - but the fewer changes needed, the faster the operation. Plus, if I wish to take advantage of the gorgeous jpeg images out of he Fujifilm X cameras, it is as well to be spot-on.

Okay, Legless Lou is there to ensure that I am looking a a standard two-light portrait setup: Elinchrom 500 EL on the right with a standard reflector and a similar head feeding a giant Redwing softbox on the left. ( Note: we have one of these giant softboxes left for sale but you need to be foolhardy and vicious to put it together. I put mine together...) The grey backdrop is there to remove weird reflections.

The Macbeth colour card is there to give accurate repeatable flat colours plus a grey scale. Mine is an old card, but we sell new ones made by Datacolor and X-rite here in the shop. Buy one, even if you don't take pictures - they look pretty and it's good for business.

Any rate, I carefully set it up, made exposure trials, and then lettered a series of paper slips to let me identify which white balance setting was used for each shot. I ranged it from 4200ºK to 6000ºK in the steps that the menu allows in the Fujifilm cameras. Then I shot a series of test exposures plus one at Auto WB.

Clever readers will realise that I was not thinking - the EXIF data tagged onto each exposure had all the detail I needed to differentiate the shots...the pink slips were just extra work.

Okay - shots from the X-E2 and X-100 were taken with the Elinchrom setup and the Fujifilm EF 42 speed light and loaded into the computer. I set up the Macbeth card next to the monitor with my standardised print assessment light on it so that I could see screen and card equally - and ran the series of shots through the Silkypix 6.

I was deliberately trying to find the most accurate of the settings to yield exactly the same balance all the way through. It turned out - for me on my system, mind - to be:

Silkypix 6 "Faithful", standard colour, a little strong contrast...

X-E2 and X-100 plus Elinchrom studio monoblocks...5600ºK

X-E2 and X-100 plus Fujifilm EF 42 speed light.........5900ºK

Note as well that this was done cold sober and before 10:00 at night. If I were to alter either or both of those two conditions, I should not warrant the accuracy of my judgement.

Now, I know the accurate colour base for my shots. Now I can do this:

Multicoloured Bingo Card Now In Stock

Those of you old enough to have someone else's teeth in your mouth will recognise the heading image. McBeth Colour Checker. X-Rite Colour Checker. Piece of cardboard with standardised colour panels on the front. Everybody's got one and everybody can talk the same colour over the phone because they are all the same.

Prop one up in the leading frame of your studio, wedding, or film shoot and then look at what you've got when you see it on the main computer screen at home. Curse, shout, or smile, as the occasion takes you, but in the end do whatever you need to do to get the output to equal the Colour Checker.

The panels have been variously described as Caucasian or African skin, Foliage Green, Sky Blue, etc. About the only really definite statement you can make is that there is a cyan, yellow, and magenta and a pretty good blue, green, and red there. Plus a white to black progression. The nipple pink block in the middle is the colour that Canadians get when they mix all the remnant tins of paint in the garage together to get enough to paint the back porch. The purple patch next to it is the same thing but in this case it pertains to Finnish-Canadians. Trust me on this...

The surface is matt and the colours are fast - mine has stayed the same for decades. And the cardboard is really sturdy - you can beat your studio assistant about the ears with it and it won't fall apart.

Welcome To The Expodisc Lab...

In the same fine scientific spirit that inspires the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory ( ie. light the fuse and run like hell...) I decided to test out three of the products that we sell here at the shop - working in conjunction with each other. Those of you with a technical bent may find that this is technically...bent. But read on.

I have a very mixed lighting situation here at the Editorial Centre ( the old storeman's desk ). There are two fluorescent lights above the desk with three disparate tubes.  One is yellow, one is pink, and one is green. I feel like a tray of mince set out in the butchers. At the end of the day. Cheap.

My Fuji X-10 has a number of ways to set the white balance. Auto, custom, fluorescent 1, 2, and 3. I decided to see if they worked and to add the further factor of an Expodisc to see if it did as it claimed.
The target was a sort of cheap Macbeth card that we had in the cabinet downstairs - not a real X-rite card, just a substitute.

Here are the results - in case the hand-written notes don't show, they are auto, custom, flourescent 2 and 3, and Expodisc.

My conclusion is that the Expodisc does as good as a custom white balance off a pure white card. Of course this IS a custom white balance, but done through a scrambling filter and done very conveniently whenever you change your lighting setup.

 It isn't available in a small enough size to be really useful for the X-10 but it is readily adapted to the lenses on my DSLR. I should think it would be a real boon to those people who shoot all natural light in changing conditions - particularly if they do not have the comfort of RAW files to fall back upon.

The heading image? Chelsea Bunz of course.

Ten O'Clock At Night

Ten o'clock at night. Remember that time. It is important for photographers - it was in the analog days and is even more so now that we use digital.


10:00 PM is the dividing point between success and failure - between reputation and disgrace. In some cases it is the determining factor in life or death. Let me explain.

If you are a wedding photographer or someone who covers social events like corporate balls, 10:00 PM is the point of time when you must either leave in a calm and professional manner, or stay and eventually help shovel the corpses into the truck. The booze will have been turned on at 6:00 and four hours is more than enough time to fuel the company. If you leave at 10:00 you avoid having to protect your gear from flying drunks and/or rescue your assistant from amorous embraces. You can drive home safely without going to sleep and ending upside-down in a ditch.

And of course you remember the primary rule of event photographers - do not download your cards or try to do any processing after 10:00. Never mind the phrase " deadline ". The only thing that will be dead is you if you inadvertently erase or damage the information on that card through inattention. The bride and groom and the ship's company are not going to disappear if you don't hand them an entire job completed next morning. They want the pictures and they will be back to get them.

Likewise, do not attempt to do professional colour work on files after 10:00 PM even if it is next day. Your eyes tire and your colour perception may well lead you astray after this time. I accept that if you have calibrated your camera, screen, and printer with the appropriate Datacolor or X-rite products - and I do - that you are starting with a level playing surface. I accept the fact that EIZO monitors are the best on the market. But after 10:00 YOU are tilting and are likely to make the wrong decision about what you see.

At this point users of  Lightroom, Aperture and a number of other editing programs point out that they can batch-process any number of images and if they got one looking good earlier in the evening, all they would have to do is press the button and their work would be done. Never - even with the assistance of this feature they still need to tweak here and there and as soon as they do it with tired eyes the whole job is a patchwork quilt again.

This was also the case in the analog days - I lost an entire costume ball through to trying to mix chemistry and process the film after returning to the darkroom late at night. Wrong recipe, flat black negatives...

Please note that it is also a bad idea to clean firearms, purchase real estate in Queensland, or contract marriage after 10:00 at night.

Good Night.

Apple OSX Lion Upgrade

The much anticipated upgrade to the Apple operating system has been released in the form of OSX Lion.  Apple certainly has come a long way since OSX Kitten.......sorry couldn't help myself!

But seriously, the introduction of the system has not come without it's issues with compatibility with other programs.

At this stage we are aware that the following programs are not as yet compatible with the new upgrade;
X-Rite
Datacolor
Photoshop CS3 and earlier
Some issues with certain interface features of CS4 and CS5

Nik Software has proven to be fine with the upgrade if you had it installed prior to upgrading, however the Nik plug-ins will not work if you try to load them after upgrading to Lion.

Epson engineers have advised an update for printers requiring Rosetta will not be available until mid-September, early-October.

Our advice is to carefully check the compatibility of your current programs before upgrading.  Most "bugs" are ironed out within six months so to save any issues, hold off upgrading until all patches/drivers to match have been released by manufacturers.

Don't Let Your Images Down with Poor Calibration

In today's digital world simply taking a great image sometimes isn't enough.  Your workflow from capture to print is only as strong as it's weakest link.  Uncalibrated screens, incorrect colour temperature settings at capture,  print profiles and optics can easily turn a brilliant image into an image that....well....just isn't!  Colour shifting, muddy shadows, clipped highlights and backfocusing can all ruin images which otherwise would have been perfect.

Camera Electronic can solve these problems for you and set you up with a precise and easy to understand calibration management system.  We can do the hard work of setting up and explaining all the behind the scenes stuff leaving you free to do what you do best.

We stock calibration solutions from DataColor, X-Rite, Digital Image Flow and Eizo and we can even create custom ICC profiles for all printable media types.  Come in and see us to discuss how to get the best from your images without the headache or guess work.