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need help from a color pro


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ronmatt

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I've never held much faith in Illustrator's color to begin with. But here's one for you.. I have 3 machines. a Mac G5 tiger, a Dell 8200 and an HP with Vista. I have 2 monitors. a 20" Viewsonic and a 24"
Samsung LCD Colorsynch. CS3 on the Mac and HP, CS2 on the Dell. My color profiles are the same on everything. I tried something not to long ago.
I opened a photo in PS on all 3 machines. Turned off the color management and enlarged the images so that the pixels were about 1/8" and took readings. All 3 machines read the same pixel differently.
I switched the monitors around. Different again. Opened the photo in illustrator. The 'per pixel' readings were different between Ill and PS on the same machine ( side by side ) and different in Illustrator from machine and monitor to machine and monitor. Needless to say I became quite frustrated ( and wished I'd never started the experiment ) I mentioned this to a friend of mine who's a pre-press tech. He tried the same experiment where he works on 5 different Macs and 1 PC. The results were the same. ( now he's upset ) I've come to the conclusion that there is no absolute in this case. I was of the opinion that regardless of the computer and/or monitor, the color values were mathematical equations. in other words, if the color value of a pixel was 21% C - 47%M - 81%Y - 54%K then no matter how it displayed or whether it was a Mac or PC, a CRT or LCD those were the numbers. What am I missing here?????
 
Hi ronmatt :),

Nice to hear that you have carried out a test......

Yes it will give you different results because it depends upon the configuration of your PC

Here many thing you have to take into consideration is the monitor.......ie how many million/bill/tril colours that your monitor is capable of to show you the exact colour.

We have different monitors from various manufactures...so the colour specifications and their technical values differson how they manufacture it.

And also it is also IMP that your CPU is able to handle the perfect colour depths.............because if your playing a high end 3D Game then you definitely use a Graphic card to shoe the best colour diplay while your playing the game with out any jerks.

Different graphic card with different configuration, pixel shaders.......

So there's a difference between monitors,graphic cards and CPU configurations.

I am not an xpert but i hope this message will help you.
 
MindBlasting. Thanks for the response, but you may have missed the context here. I'll highlight it again;

I have an image..I open it in PSCS3 and I open it in Illustrator CS3.. They are side by side on a 24" monitor. They both are
cmyk, color management off. The monitor color profile is moot because both photos are on the same monitor at the same time in different applications.

Both images are magnified to the point where the pixels are 1/8". Using the eyedropper tool and picking one pixel in PS, I take a reading which is C=60, M=47, Y=28, K=11. Now I switch to Illustrator and read the very same pixel. The reading is
C=55, M=52, Y=31, K=7.

Mind you, both images are on the screen, side by side on a 24" monitor, but in the 2 different apps. The source image is the same. The source image is cmyk, not converted in the app. \:/
 
ronmatt said:
They both are cmyk, color management off.
Click to expand...

Because Photoshop doesn't turn off it's color management and Illustrator does. You can tell Photoshop "do not color manage"... but that doesn't turn OFF color management... it just (basically) randomly picks how it wants to display the color.
The entire point of color management is to fix exactly what you're seeing happen. So of course it's going to be weird when you turn it off. In order for those mathematically precise formulae to properly apply, there has to be some method of translating the differences in hardware, that method is the color management and color profiles that you're attempting to turn off.

Color is such a pain in the butt. heh
 
Thanks Mindbender, That explains a lot. I'll assign a profile to the image and test again.
I just want to be sure that all my machines and monitors are within a percent or 2 of each
other and that what I send out for print is relatively close to the way I'm seeing it. I know that
it will never be 'dead on'.
 
Well... the proof is in the pudding as they say...

If you have calibrated equipment, and you use a standardized color profile for your documents, and that profile is passed through and read when the image is output... it should print reasonably predictably between devices.

There are always hiccups... but in general, that's how it's supposed to work.

Also, I can't speak to how CS3 does things. I don't know if they've changed anything in that... but it's worked about the same since version 5 - 5.5 I believe, as described. Honestly, I haven't looked into how CS3 deals with color to know if it's the same or changed. I didn't see any major differences when I've played with it.. but I also didn't use it for any color critical work.
 
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