iPads and Color Management

Erica AitkenRods and Cones

Agenda

• iPads and business• Color Management and the iPad• How best to prepare your files for the iPad

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Pixels and Motion

• New Division• Out of Chaos

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

iPads fit in the printing world

• Printers have a ready client base• Providing digital versions to clients is a new

source of revenue• Entry in this new service can be incremental

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Who uses iPads?

• 91% of professionals use tablets for work• 72% of those have replaced their laptop with iPads for a great portion of their work

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Pros from every industry

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Source: www.apple.com/ipad/business.com!

Apple and color management?• There are no CM settings in the iOS• Color management, if any, will come from third party developers• And will always require that the tablet be tethered to the computer, when calibrating

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Let’s start at the beginning• What happens to an image when it’s brought onto an iPad • It’s automatically converted to sRGB in Apple apps when a transformation is requested but left as is in other apps• In the iOS, the tone curve is not sRGB, leaving to different contrasts• Images can become very weird if a profile is attached and ignored (which it will be on the iPad)

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

The gamut of an iPad

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Anandtech: A good resource

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Helios: Luminance Uniformity

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

• 10-25 Delta (candelas) JUST Color Communicator 2 Light Booth• 6-10 Delta for Retina iPad (full size)• Under 5 Delta Eizo or Quato monitor

• 9 Field Test

Jeffrey Friedl’s experiment• Dramatizes how different images with embedded profiles will look in a non color-managed browser and in iOS devices• Jeffrey embedded a profile in an image and introduced “wonky” data should the browser/iOS device have to guess what to display

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

No CM in iOS = No centralized color management.

• Datacolor• Eizo• X-Rite• What should it be?

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Datacolor

• About Datacolor• iPad color management solution: • Spyder colorimeter and SpyderGALLERY

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Datacolor: What works?

• It provides an accurate viewing environment, under specific conditions• Under these specific conditions, you can view accurate color in Facebook and Flickr

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Datacolor: What’s wrong?

• Datacolor assumes that, when you’ve profiled your iPad, you will see the exact output of your specific iPad (hardware issue.)• But it ignores embedded profiles. SpyderGALLERY assumes that all images are sRGB•Useful? Definitely especially as tool to present a portfolio

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

Eizo: iPad CM, another way

• A bit about Eizo

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

• Discovering an unusual need in the moving picture industry

Eizo: monitors emulate tablets

• Profile the iPad• Create adjustment target to emulate the iPad• Adjust monitor to match iPad• Save adjustment settings• Begin emulation

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

X-Rite: Where art thou?

• X-Rite has conducted two surveys in 2012• Are now in beta phase for a solution• Hope to launch their solution in January 2014

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

What should a good solution be?

• It will NOT be iOS-based • The solution will calibrate tablets• It must honor embedded profiles• It has to be adopted by app developers

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?

What can you do today for better universal color fidelity?

iPads and Color Management: who needs and how does it work?