| Gretag Macbeth Eye One Display Review |
| Written by Maxit | ||||||
Retail Price £200 - Supplier Gretag Macbeth
Hands up the owners of digital cameras, inkjet printers and expensive editing software. Come on don't be shy. We've all rushed out to buy the latest technology to ensure the holiday snaps look hot. Now how many of you have ever stopped to consider the colour accuracy or your monitor?
Sure, you'd splash out a few hundred bucks on an inkjet printer or even five hundred pounds for some Adobe loving. But what's the use of all that expensive technology if your monitor can't display colour accurately. You might aswell close your eyes, press the print button and say three Hail Mary's. Okay maybe you have tried using software solutions to manually adjust a display's image to perfection. A royal pain in the butt - one image looks great and you load another one up and it looks terrible. Help is at hand with a clever piece of hardware from Gretag Macbeth called the Eye One Display.
The device is targetted towards digital photographers, graphic artists and home enthusiasts wishing to get the most from their monitor. But before we look at the Eye One, let's find out about the importance of colour management to users in the digital world.
So why colour manage?
The best explanation as to the nature of colour management is the toaster analogy by Steve Upton:
"Let's say you get up in the morning, walk out to your kitchen and place a piece of bread in your toaster setting it to a level of "4". After a little while a certain color of toast pops out - hopefully a pleasing color. Now if you take the next piece of bread in the loaf over to your neighbors and put it in his toaster at the same setting of "4" do you think you will get the same color of toast? Probably not. This is the problem of color management. The settings used on the toaster do not necessarily produce the same colors. As in the toaster, RGB and CMYK values on your computer are also just settings. And, just like the toasters, when they are sent to different devices, they produce different colors!"
This is the problem of color management. The settings used on the toaster do not necessarily produce the same colors. As in the toaster, RGB and CMYK values on your computer are also just settings. And, just like the toasters, when they are sent to different devices, they produce different colors!
Now if you were a severe toast geek, you would toast 10 pieces of bread in your toaster; one at every setting. Then you would lay them all out in order on your kitchen table, grab the bag of bread and head over to your neighbor's. Avoiding his bewildered stares you would toast 10 pieces of bread in his toaster and take them back to lay on your table beside your toaster's work. Fanning through your Pantone? independent toast guide(*) you would decide that "B" was, in fact, the color of toast you prefer. Looking up and down your toaster column you would confirm that yes, indeed, "4" is the setting on your toaster that will get you the color you want - you know this after several mornings of frantically waving smoke away from the alarm on your kitchen ceiling. After looking over your neighbor's toaster column, you note that a setting of "6" is what is needed to get the color you want from his toaster."
By sampling what a device will do and comparing it to an independent guide for actual colour, accurate colour management between devices can be achieved. So how did all this come about? Well, if you managed to stay awake during physics class you might know that the human eye perceives colour as wave lengths of light entering the eye and hitting receptors that create electrical signals to the brain. The brain translates the wave lengths into what we call colour. The Comission Internationale de L'Eclairage (CIE) - not a commission for chocolate eclairs I might add - established a set of standards based on how the human eye interprets colours. They came up with this horseshoe shaped colour space in 1931.
The horseshoe colour space shows the full range of colour the human eye can see.
In the 1970's, the CIE went one step better and came up with a mathematical model of colour space called LAB - a standard providing a three dimensional view that is the most complete color model used conventionally to describe all the colors visible to the human eye.
Lab in all it's 3 dimensional glory
LAB provides a range of numbers ( eg: 255,255,0) that describe how a colour looks under certain lighting conditions, from a standard distance to a point on the retina of an eye, to the average person. And it defines colour values in a device independant manner - the colour is consistent colour regardless of the device producing it. Now let's look at this in context. The horseshoe is often used to show the range of gamut available to a colour space from Adobe 1998, sRGB to CYMK. Gamut shows how wide a colour space is in for any device. Monitors, printers, scanners and digital cameras have differing gamuts and render colours in different ways. So what happens when you combine all these devices and make the final print out? Usually an image that is totally off from what you expected.
To combat this problem, in 1993, an organisation called the International Colour Consortium or ICC was created to make a set of colour standards. The idea was simple - to provide a point of reference to allow these devices to work in a consistent, accurate and managed environment. ICC profiles attached to the software of any device or compliant operating system allow the system wide communication of the ICC profiles between devices. The ICC profile can tell the operating system or software the correct colour space, ensuring the best possible colour rendering between the devices. Macintosh users have enjoyed ICC compliance for many years with the PC platform jumping on the bandwagon properly in Windows 2000 and XP.
Proper colour management profiles are the key to quality results from digital files.
Typical profiles would include: Monitor , Scanner , Camera, Printer.
Perhaps the first most important step is the accurate calibration of the monitor - the device that allows you to judge and correct images. Don't be fooled into thinking a software solution such as Adobe Gamma correction will do. For good consistent results you need proper hardware profiling equipment. Let's see if the Eye One can cure those ICC blues and take us on the road to colour management nirvana...
Gretag MacBeth Eye One CalibrationWritten instructions supplied with the package are very basic with just a few simple steps. The first indicates the installation of the software from the cd before plugging the colorimeter into a spare USB port. The software installs quickly and after connecting the device, Windows XP (also compatible with windows 98, ME, Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.1 or higher - phew) recognizes the new hardware and completes the setup process. And that's the whole installation process and the end of the written instruction booklet.
It might have been nice if Gretag included a few pages on colour management and tips for getting the most out of the system to rounds things off. Good job they have an excellent web site that covers a whole range of colour topics for beginner to advance users along with a members only support section.
Running the Eye One software is a straightforward affair. A flash tutorial is available at every stage of the calibration process, should you need help, and a step by step approach makes the whole thing a breeze. To demonstrate how easy it is, here's a quick run down for profiling a monitor on a PC platform. Before jumping right in to the good stuff, it's a good idea to make sure any current profile is removed from the system startup folder and the advanced colour management settings located within control panel display properties - color management. If you have photoshop installed make sure Adobe Gamma is disabled. This should prevent any conflicts with the new profile. Fire up the software, choose the device you would like to profile (in this case a monitor) and you should see a screen like this:
 Gretag MacBeth Eye One Calibration (continued) |
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