Get your whites right!
Spent the last two days at Sim2 learning how to use their new calibration software to set up the projectors. Always good to continue education.
It was very interesting and brought back a lot of the stuff I learned on the Imaging Sciences Foundation (ISF) course. It is always useful to have these things reinforced and one of the things that returned quite forcefully is the idea that if a projector or screen is not properly calibrated then how can we know that what we see is what the director intended? One of the best examples is the original Matrix movie which was given a green tint in post production - trying to get natural skin tones just by eye on that would have caused some fun!
The human eye is easily deceived and only with proper calibration equipment can the display device be set up so that the white is the right white. Forget the Inuit having many names for snow, we need a plethora of names for the "colour" white that can be seen in TV shops. There is only one right white and that is known as D65. Or 6500 degrees kelvin. Or the colour of daylight. But even then not quite that simple. Daylight ranges from 5000k (direct sunlight at noon) to 7500k (overcast sky) so when seting up a display what is used is an X Y reference from the C.I.E. chromaticity diagram which gives the "colour of grey" as x = .313 y = .329. Set up a display to those values and you will see what the film director intended.
Displays tend to be set up with over saturated colours to allow them to stand out in shop environments - not the best viewing at home!
So, if the pitch looks too green, the snow looks grey, or the sky looks too blue then perhaps a spot of adjustment is called for! To do this properly takes expensive calibration equipment but you can have a good DIY stab at it by using one of the HDTV calibration discs available - happy tweaking.
jeff
It was very interesting and brought back a lot of the stuff I learned on the Imaging Sciences Foundation (ISF) course. It is always useful to have these things reinforced and one of the things that returned quite forcefully is the idea that if a projector or screen is not properly calibrated then how can we know that what we see is what the director intended? One of the best examples is the original Matrix movie which was given a green tint in post production - trying to get natural skin tones just by eye on that would have caused some fun!
The human eye is easily deceived and only with proper calibration equipment can the display device be set up so that the white is the right white. Forget the Inuit having many names for snow, we need a plethora of names for the "colour" white that can be seen in TV shops. There is only one right white and that is known as D65. Or 6500 degrees kelvin. Or the colour of daylight. But even then not quite that simple. Daylight ranges from 5000k (direct sunlight at noon) to 7500k (overcast sky) so when seting up a display what is used is an X Y reference from the C.I.E. chromaticity diagram which gives the "colour of grey" as x = .313 y = .329. Set up a display to those values and you will see what the film director intended.
Displays tend to be set up with over saturated colours to allow them to stand out in shop environments - not the best viewing at home!
So, if the pitch looks too green, the snow looks grey, or the sky looks too blue then perhaps a spot of adjustment is called for! To do this properly takes expensive calibration equipment but you can have a good DIY stab at it by using one of the HDTV calibration discs available - happy tweaking.
jeff
posted by Castle Sound & Vision at
13:52
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