The reason that’s so important for you to know what your talents is, is because this determines everything about your work load. Determines the quality of monitor that you’re going to use. The quality of your printer you’re going to use, whether you should use a third party rip or use the software’s applied from the manufacture for your printer. It determines everything about your workload, the frequency of your calibration. Whether you should get economical calibration, material and equipments and software or you should get the higher end. All that determine by your tolerance.

Also in reference to monitors, we first talked about CRT’s, Castaway Ray Technology. What that’s using is, it’s using a ray that’s a hitting a fluorescent. There’s a fluorescent on a monitor and the rays hitting that and it’s causing it to glow. There’s a red, green, blue, layer on that phosphorous and the blue fades faster. That’s one of the reasons why CRT’s drift so much because the phosphorous and the different colors don’t fade evenly. The blue fades way faster.

The technology of LCD, okay LCD is like a honeycomb. It’s like a honeycomb, you’re looking to little light mini diodes, and where LCD’s first came out if you’re not did on the monitor. To print the monitor change, now monitors have gotten quite a bit better and the high end monitors such as the easy one monitor. Their high is in monitor, they manufactured way thinners, so thin that you could have 12 people standing in front of the monitor at acute angles and they all see the exact same image.

So when choosing you LCD monitors, make sure you notice when you’re looking straight on to the monitor and move a foot or two foot to either side does the image change? EIZO monitors is really one of the best choices for soft proofing, because it does a hard work calibration and they also do something that nobody else does. They do digital uniformity equalizer. Each monitors measured between zero to 255 video levels for luminance and chromaticity steps across the entire screen.

They reduce the Delta E uniformity to below 3. They have 25 points of calibration that measure several hundred screens locations and measures all the screen locations and then it burns them into the monitor exactly where the LCD monitors are brighter or dimmer or vary in color. The example here on the right shows you a typical LCD monitor with variances, the red variance is up to 25 Delta E difference. The version on the left shows after the uniformity illustration, after they do perform this test and burn that in to the monitor they make the monitor that even and it’s the only manufacturer that does this type of technology to bring accuracy and uniformity to our LCD monitors.

So in determining what monitors to use, your first number one determining factor is how tight a tolerance you want and then more important to that is what your budget can afford? We’d raise a test that you can do to confirm what your monitor looks like. What we do is we—in Photoshop we go and we go to the color picker and we make an 18% gray. That’s 128 red and 128 green, 128 blue. We then open a new image applying that color to the background then we fill the entire screen with that image then we removed all the tools. All we seen is the gray filling the entire screen, by doing that, your eye can see really slight changes in gray. Your eye can‘t see changes in big bright colors, but in gray it can be off as light as the amount your eye can see the changes. So by filling the whole entire screen with gray like you see here you can see at this color fringing on the corner. You can see if it’s just white evenly, you can move your head from right to left, top and bottom and see if the monitor looks different as you move your head in different locations. And you’ll see a lot of the cheaper monitors, they have a lot of color fringing, were greens in the corners, magenta is in the corner, this is a good test to see what your monitor looks like.

These two main software packages to make profiles and that is I want match and profile maker. What determines which one that you get it comes back again to your Delta E tolerance expectancy, what was your limit, what was the range that you wanted your quality to be at? If you’re in the 2-3 range, it’s like the most critical and tightest range you can get then you going to need profile maker. It’s the top of the line bundle, if you can get a way with a range around 4-5 Delta E then you can use the i1 match.

There are two reading devices to use with these software’s, both reading devices read the exact same way quality levels, it just an issue of time. We have a manual reading device that read stripes and you manually swipe the stripes, okay and then we also have an IO table, it’s an automated device. The swatch reader that you do manually, it takes about 20-25 minutes to read the 918 patches. The IO table read 918 patches in about 2 minutes 15 seconds. The IO table is an automated and intended system, you just line up three different base points and it watches and reads everything automated for you.

In reference to a monitor calibrations, when you calibrate in a monitor majority of most monitors just do software calibrating. Another words, by software, using the ICC profile, it’s making adjustment to that monitor. It doesn’t make any hardware changes to it. There is a monitor though, and it’s really important that we talk about this because there’s some of you that going to demand a Delta E tolerance of 2-3. If you’re demanding a Delta E tolerance of 2-3, you need more of a high-end monitor in such as the EIZO that uses hardware calibration.

That means the monitors not only connect to the computers through your video card but also through a USB cable and the computer controls the device. The drivers and the device in the hardware to bring those in a calibration before it does a software calibration. What that means is it gets a way better look up tables smoother graduations, more accurate match to Adobe RGB in to what our printers can be produced and match some smoother blending.