Bob Croxford wrote: > A viewing booth is only an expensive way of producing what is > coming in your window for free, daylight. Real daylight will always be > 100% better than anything that comes out of a fluo tube.
Bob, I politely disagree: Most of the graphic arts have standardisen on a specific daylight (D50) to be able to have a specific defined lightsourcs, as opposed to daylight. The spectral properties in daylight can vary a great deal, and pending on the high wavelength component optical brightener in a paper will be triggered by different amounts changing not only amount of apparent light but also the colour that the eye use as white point. A viewing booth of verified quality is the only way to be able to see the same colour at different locations. Full Stop. We can easily agree that a small amount of the work we all do is actually viewed in a light box (Playboy excluded maybe, but that's to obscure the view from the next guy <G>). However our perception of things change more than a bit pending on the environment we use to evaluate colours and the light. We can easily agree that taking something outside or even evaluate it under tungsten and a range of fluorescent tubes IN ADDITION to a lightbox can be invaluable to find the best compromise in final print. Forget about doing this to proof due to illuminant metamerism though. However as it is very hard to establish exactly where and how a given piece is to be viewed we must have a standard. And "daylight" (which can range from 2800K/horizon light to 16000K/open shade 6000 feet above sea) is not exactly a standard. You may get away with taking your final print outside when you're printing in Italy given that the amount of sunshine hours is considerably higher than in both the UK and Denmark, and mid day sun is probably the closest you'll get to D50 (although it'll be a bit warmer in Italy than Copenhagen), but "daylight" as a concept is much too elusive to be used to evaluate colour, especially if you want others to see things the way you did... Best Regards Thomas Holm / Pixl ApS - Photographer & Colour Management Consultant - Adobe Certified Training Provider in Photoshop� - Apple Solutions Expert - Colour Management - Imacon Authorized Scanner Training Facility - Remote Profiling Service (Output ICC profiles) - Seminars speaker and tutor on CM and Digital Imaging etc. - Home Page: www.pixl.dk � Email: th[AT]pixl.dk -- =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
