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GO TO PULSE COLOR ELITE MONITOR PROFILING GO TO PULSE COLOR ELITE PRINTER AND SCANNER PROFILING GO TO Xrite GAMUTWORKS AND TOOLS
COLOR MANAGEMENT WITH X-RITE PULSE COLOR ELITE SYSTEM PART THREE: DIGITAL CAMERA PROFILING
Digital cameras have certainly got many very powerful algorithms but a color management would be incomplete without profiling the digital camera as well. I tried it out myself and ever very good systems like those from Sony show a further improvement once they have been profiled. What I show in the following was done with an older camera, a Sony DSC D700, to show the differences between before and after profiling more pronounced than with most recently launched cameras. What you need to do before you start with the
profiling procedure is to take a picture of the Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker
chart. You must take it without any color corrections or color enhancements
activated in your camera and with a non-automatic white point setting. I have
set my camera to "Daylight" and turned all color algorithms and other functions
off. The starting point is again the first initial start screen of the program and as a camera is another input device, you have to choose "Input" as program option
The next step is to select Digital Camera - you then get in topic 2. into the menu which allows to choose which color chart you are going to use - the most common one is definitely the Gretag Macbeth Color Checker, which was also my choice. Press continue to get to the next screen
This screen tells you what I mentioned in the beginning - taking a picture of the chart and what to do with it, how to store and what size it should not exceed. From my own experience, I would suggest that you do not edit in any image editor other than crop and resize - do not adjust contrast and brightness, the program will deliver an error message in that case as it obviously recognizes the changes made to the original file. Only cropping and resizing is fine, nothing else. Now we get to the next screen - you need to upload that image of the ColorChecker target into the program
Select the appropriate file and upload it
This is how the file looked like - only cropped and resized and stored as uncompressed TIF file - without additional sharpening, no contrast and no brightness adjustments made. The screenshot below shows the same file but contrast adjusted in Photoshop and this adjustment made the program to fail and report an error, so do not make any adjustments as mentioned before!
After you have uploaded the file, you are almost done. The next screen checks the alignment of the chart - in most cases, it is done fully automatically and you do not need to do anything, just check that it is OK as it is shown on the next screen
You can see that the uploaded file is identical to the "Good Scan!" icon displayed on the bottom right - press Continue and go to the next screen
If everything worked fine, you usually do not see this screen as the alignment is done automatically. But if you see this screen, the program wants you to double-check the alignment of the four corners - as you can see here, they are perfectly aligned. This is an indication that the program recognized the target properly - but if you press "Continue", you see on the next screen, why it showed this screen
Here you see, this was the target which I have adjusted for contrast optimization - and the program did not measure it and reported it as an error. Again, take the original file, resize and crop it and use it as TIF file as is! If you have taken the unaltered file, you do not get this screen here and you are reaching the final screen - the profile is about to be written
Choose a name and location for your camera profile and let it be created. That was all. If you now want to use the profile for your pictures from that very same camera, you need to tell your image editing program which color profile it has to take as input profile - same procedure as for a scanner input profile. As before, the folder here is the one which is used in Windows XP for all color profiles. Other Windows versions have different folders - check with your SW where the color profiles should be stored.
GO TO PULSE COLOR ELITE MONITOR PROFILING GO TO PULSE COLOR ELITE PRINTER AND SCANNER CALIBRATION GO TO Xrite GAMUTWORKS AND TOOLS
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