Using an Apple iMAC for Photographers


	*phototestcenter.com*


	*The Mac Page*


	*If you’re a serious photographer should you buy an Apple Mac?*


	*Taking a bite out of an Apple - The story so far*

Should you buy an Apple? The answer to that question is what the the Mac page is about. I’m a freelance pro photographer and my last conventional enlarger, my wonderful De Vere 504, has now gone to live in the basement with all my other darkroom kit. It had sat in place in my “darkroom” surrounded by inkjet printers for 5 years after I stopped using it, before I could bring myself to do that. Daily life now involves about as many computers as cameras. Up ‘til now they’ve all been Windows based PC’s, which I build myself. Over the years I’ve tried various color management systems - Most recently a very expensive Eye One Pro screen / printer / projector calibration set. Now it may just be me, but although all of the kit helps, none of it ever seems to completely solve the problem. Strangely enough everyone else who uses the kit finds the same.

Screen profiling definitely helps, although screen brightness is an issue - Modern LCD screens are very bright in comparison to the CRT screens we all had a few years ago and I’ve come across a couple of great PC screens recently (Benq 241FP and Samsung 226CW) which just don’t calibrate well, if at all, for photography. They’re designed to make computer games look great - not to be totally accurate. So are things any different with Macs?

In a word yes. The screens on the Apple iMacs in our local PC World always looked superb, with far better viewing angles than most PC screens. This is another big issue - viewing angles are really important with LCD screens. It’s no fun trying to use a screen where raising your head a few inches makes an image go from too dark to too light. How do you adjust levels or curves with a screen like that? You can’t. Most PC screens suffer from this problem - Don’t believe quoted viewing angles - they’re optimistic and refer to life in a galaxy where photography doesn’t exist. Try not to buy a screen without checking viewing angles out first. I did, and, although my first flat screen looked great for games or browsing, and quoted 170 degree viewing angles, it was useless for photography because of poor viewing angles. Now when I look at screens I do an impression of a demented duck, bobbing my head up and down to see how much the image changes. Horizontal viewing angles matter too, but it’s vertical viewing angles that are usually the problem. Not with a Mac though. Round one to Apple Macs.

Screen Calibration : Profiling your screen, whether PC or Mac is a must for all serious photographers. Most screens are way too bright out of the box and with PC’s colors are never quite right either. To fix this you need an ICC profile which loads whenever the computer starts up. Why is this important? Well, say you create the image of your lifetime - a masterpiece - and adjust it in Photoshop so it looks absolutely perfect. If your screen is properly adjusted and profiled it should look that good on any screen. Without profiling you have no idea how it will look on other screens. It may only be a masterpiece on your screen and look 2 stops underexposed and have a horrible cyan cast on every other screen. You must calibrate your screen.

There are lots of systems out there to do this - from the Pantone Huey (review to come, but for now - just don’t buy one) to expensive Eye One and Spider packages which can make printer and projector profiles too. But you don’t need to spend lots of cash. Photoshop comes with a utility called Adobe Gamma which is a basic on screen, calibrate by eye freebie. Some screen manufacturers - notably Samsung - supply a similar utility. Although this isn’t the most accurate way, Adobe Gamma is much better than nothing (or a Huey). If you have Adobe Photoshop on your PC you’ll find Adobe Gamma in the Control Panel.

With Mac’s software profiling is really easy. Look in System Preferences / Displays / Color and press the Calibrate button. Then it’s just a matter of choosing to use PC or Mac gamma - My customers all use PC’s so it’s PC for me - then choosing the white point and you’re calibrated. There is an expert mode with more options along the lines of an advanced Adobe Gamma, but the easy mode seems to work just fine and produced an almost identical result to hardware profiling with my Eye One. Which means the screen is pretty well spot on out of the box apart from the brightness which is too high for technically correct viewing conditions - dim daylight. The Eye One setting was about one click above the minimum brightness for the iMac’s display, although this does depend a bit on ambient lighting levels.

As every PC screen I’ve used has needed constant corrections to color, contrast and brightness, while really all the iMac needed was the screen brightness turned down a bit, it’s Round two to Apple Macs.


	*to be continued*


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	All text and images copyright David Gold 2006 - 2008 and must not be reproduced in any way without permission davidgold@ezeedsl.co.uk


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