Using a curve to simulate a print when viewing on a screen

[DavidMillier]

I'm not a fan of viewing photographs on a screen. To me, it comes no where near the satisfaction of viewing a good print. It's nothing to do with colour or resolution, but for me a screen image is simply too bright and painful. A print is a gentler, more relaxed experience. Some people regard this as an advantage of screen viewing: it is a more dramatic, punchy, vivid experience but I find that becomes wearing very quickly. I like prints. But you can't hang many prints when you have about 2 sq metres of free wall space in your entire house.

Now that I'm experimenting with digital frames/canvasses (I turned an old monitor into a digital frame last night, driving it with an old asus chromebit dongle, and I have a Meural 15" canvas with its library of classic art), it's clear that the problem with screens is not the shadows and mid tones (which are excellent), but the highlights. A screen is asymmetrically too bright in the higher registers, the areas where paper is relatively compressed and dull.

That is the main problem: the screen does not mimic paper because it is relatively too bright in the highlights, exactly where paper, especially matte paper, is compressed and dull.

So, the question becomes: if we can't match screen and paper hardware physically, can we make a screen mimic paper more convincingly by artificially editing the image highlights with a curve so they are duller? And if so, what curve?

I've been playing around by trial and error which is sort of problematic because the eye is so adaptable. But is there a way of doing this mechanically, applying a corrective curve that has been worked out and measured?

It seems to me to be the kind of thing where an experienced imaging scientist might be able to help....

--
Photo of the day: https://whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/photo-of-the-day/
Website: http://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/ (2022 - website rebuilt, updated and back in action)
DPReview gallery: https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0286305481
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/ (very old!)

 

[Fujiukian]

What you want to do is called soft proofing. What software are you using ? Photoshop and Lightroom have this functionality built in, where you apply a profile that simulates the type of paper, ink and printer you are using. Paper manufacturers often supply these profiles on their websites. There is lots of online information if you search 'softproof'

 

[DavidMillier]

What you want to do is called soft proofing. What software are you using ? Photoshop and Lightroom have this functionality built in, where you apply a profile that simulates the type of paper, ink and printer you are using. Paper manufacturers often supply these profiles on their websites. There is lots of online information if you search 'softproof'

Primarily darktable for my current images. Lightroom for images prior to 2019. darktable has softproofing.

Playing with soft proofing set for my matte paper, it does slightly reduce the highlight brightness and raise the shadows for a greyer, foggier look. But it still doesn't really look like paper and it only works in edit mode, not in display or slide show mode.

But interesting to see it is doing something similar to my trial and error method.

 

[Fujiukian]

There are some fundamentals you can't escape .....

Computer monitors emit light in many different combinations of Red Green and Blue

Prints reflect light and the colours and tones they reflect are based on the colour, brightness and direction of the light source. i.e. sunlight is warm, overcast light is cold

Our brains do then 'get in the way' and are quite good at compensating for light sources we believe should be white but aren't quite

Making a computer monitor appear like paper is going to have limited success. Imagine what paper looks like when you turn the light off. It's going to be close to black. A screen that emits or generates coloured light is still visible.

There are some relatively expensive products that attempt to create a paper like viewing experience of digital images, have a look at Meural Canvas.

 

[DavidMillier]

There are some fundamentals you can't escape .....

Computer monitors emit light in many different combinations of Red Green and Blue

Prints reflect light and the colours and tones they reflect are based on the colour, brightness and direction of the light source. i.e. sunlight is warm, overcast light is cold

Our brains do then 'get in the way' and are quite good at compensating for light sources we believe should be white but aren't quite

Making a computer monitor appear like paper is going to have limited success. Imagine what paper looks like when you turn the light off. It's going to be close to black. A screen that emits or generates coloured light is still visible.

There are some relatively expensive products that attempt to create a paper like viewing experience of digital images, have a look at Meural Canvas.

I got a Meural yesterday (the 15" model). It's good with the library of art but when showing my own photos, it looks no different from a computer monitor ie the highlights are too fierce and tiring. This makes me think that with their art library images, Meural are adjusting them tonally to tame the highlights and make them look more paper-like.

I'm wondering if it is possible to make special versions of my photos with tamed highlights so they will display in a gentle and mild way on a screen. And what would such a curve look like. I'm not too bothered about matching the colours of paper, just the tones.

--
Photo of the day: https://whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/photo-of-the-day/
Website: http://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/ (2022 - website rebuilt, updated and back in action)
DPReview gallery: https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0286305481
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/ (very old!)

 

[SterlingBjorndahl]

How adjustable is the monitor? Can you experiment with various brightness, contrast, gamma, and saturation options on the monitor itself, to see if you can find an acceptable compromise?

Best wishes,
Sterling
--
Lens Grit

 

[phcd]

To repeat a post from a previous thread of last week...

"In working and printing GFX files there seems to be, for lack of a better term, a denseness in the midtones. It is a darkness that requires adjustment for proper density (lightness/darkness) in printing. I make the adjustment with a custom function in initial processing in C1. Here is what it looks like:


Capture One levels

View: original size

This adjustment retains the black level, lightens the midrange and overall look of the photograph. With some captures the process may reduce the midrange contrast which can be rebuilt with adjustments in curves."

GFX files print dark. It's a challenge to get it right between the computer monitor and final print.

 

[DavidMillier]

How adjustable is the monitor? Can you experiment with various brightness, contrast, gamma, and saturation options on the monitor itself, to see if you can find an acceptable compromise?

Best wishes,
Sterling
--
Lens Grit

Not so much on the Meural Canvas, just brightness.

 

[DavidMillier]

To repeat a post from a previous thread of last week...

"In working and printing GFX files there seems to be, for lack of a better term, a denseness in the midtones. It is a darkness that requires adjustment for proper density (lightness/darkness) in printing. I make the adjustment with a custom function in initial processing in C1. Here is what it looks like:


Capture One levels

View: original size

This adjustment retains the black level, lightens the midrange and overall look of the photograph. With some captures the process may reduce the midrange contrast which can be rebuilt with adjustments in curves."

GFX files print dark. It's a challenge to get it right between the computer monitor and final print.

So, I stopped messing with global adjustments and tried something else.

I found a free online 4k jpeg of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I uploaded it onto my Meural. The brightly lit interior of the cafe is too bright relative to the rest of the image, so I started to doing some selective masking and tone curve adjustments, just to the interior of the diner, dimming it quite a lot. Put a simulated white mat around the whole thing and uploaded the edited file to my Meural.

It works! The end result looks a lot more like paper.

It's not perfect: the white mat which looks nearer to a mid tone grey on my editing monitor still looks nearly white on the Meural: it's set up with too much contrast for my taste. And the darker surround to the diner windows are too dark: on my editing monitor there is more detail but that is fixable.

What is clear to me, is that this approach requires a close tailoring of the edit to the characteristics of the specific display device. No doubt a different display would require its own edit.

But as a proof of concept, it seems to work satisfactorily: I can tune the file to display much more like an actual framed paper print, it just takes a bit of work. Shame there isn't an obvious way to make a preset for this...

I wish there was a way to demonstrate the difference here.

--
Photo of the day: https://whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/photo-of-the-day/
Website: http://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/ (2022 - website rebuilt, updated and back in action)
DPReview gallery: https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0286305481
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/ (very old!)

 

[phcd]

You're on to it! The solution is testing. Here are a couple of ideas.

Try establishing a Curves adjustment of raise the midrange, give it a name and save the adjustment to suit your monitor and printer.

The brightness of my monitor is set for printing Canon files, but the GFX is different. With a great deal of printing experience I can almost eyeball the proper density. In preparing larger prints I always print a 4x6 test sheet.

 

[DavidMillier]

You're on to it! The solution is testing. Here are a couple of ideas.

Try establishing a Curves adjustment of raise the midrange, give it a name and save the adjustment to suit your monitor and printer.

The brightness of my monitor is set for printing Canon files, but the GFX is different. With a great deal of printing experience I can almost eyeball the proper density. In preparing larger prints I always print a 4x6 test sheet.

Upon further inspection, I decided that the Meural is too high contrast for a simulated passepartout mat and there is no way to adjust the hardware, so I removed the mat. I think if I want a mat with these kind of products, I need to cut out a physical one from mount card.

I did a new edit, masking the shadow areas and raising those a bit. Then I boosted global saturation slightly to compensate for dropping the contrast. Then I added a grain layer to provide a hint of texture that is otherwise lost in a digital image. On my editing computer is looks so good, I've turned it into wallpaper (and I never set desktop wallpaper, ever, I just like a plain background, but this looks good.

Sent it to my Meural and it also looks good - a useful improvement on the defaults - but not as good as on my computer. Calibration, icc profiling and 4k looks better. However, it still looks decent at night and even better in daylight, less contrasty and less screen-like.

One interesting takeaway from this exercise is that products like the Meural are clearly overpriced, it's hardly surprising all their competitors have gone bust. The Meural I have is the smallest 15" FHD model and it costs £350. For that, I could get a 32" 4k monitor, a chromecast or Fire TV dongle and £5 of wooden moulding to make my own custom frame. The biggest Meural is a 27" FHD and costs £900. I don't think the added value is there, I don't see them surviving long term at these prices. I'd pay a premium for not having to glue 4 sticks together to make a frame but not a 300% premium. The other selling point of the Meural is its extensive subscription library of artworks you can download onto the device. But, I discovered today, there is no copyright on classic artworks, they're public domain and it's easy to download high res jpegs for free from the web. Who wants to pay £9 per month to display the Mona Lisa in your living room, when you can do it perfectly legally for free?

But, yes, the lesson here is don't worry so much about the display hardware, just tweak the editing to suit the hardware. You can make files that display on a screen that don't fry your eyeballs.

 

[JimKasson]

There are some fundamentals you can't escape .....

Computer monitors emit light in many different combinations of Red Green and Blue

Prints reflect light and the colours and tones they reflect are based on the colour, brightness and direction of the light source. i.e. sunlight is warm, overcast light is cold

Our brains do then 'get in the way' and are quite good at compensating for light sources we believe should be white but aren't quite

Making a computer monitor appear like paper is going to have limited success.

There was a fair amount of work done in the early 90s that was successful. The key element turned out to be that the setup had to make the display appear not to be self luminous. When this was done, in a split viewing booth, monitor images could have a visual match to hard copy images with D50 illumination, which was the point.

Imagine what paper looks like when you turn the light off. It's going to be close to black. A screen that emits or generates coloured light is still visible.

There are some relatively expensive products that attempt to create a paper like viewing experience of digital images, have a look at Meural Canvas.

 

[JimKasson]

To repeat a post from a previous thread of last week...

"In working and printing GFX files there seems to be, for lack of a better term, a denseness in the midtones. It is a darkness that requires adjustment for proper density (lightness/darkness) in printing. I make the adjustment with a custom function in initial processing in C1. Here is what it looks like:


Capture One levels

View: original size

This adjustment retains the black level, lightens the midrange and overall look of the photograph. With some captures the process may reduce the midrange contrast which can be rebuilt with adjustments in curves."

GFX files print dark.

In my experience, GFX files print no darker than files from any other cameras, providing they're adjusted to look the same on the monitor. And how could they? Once the files are converted to colorimetric space, the camera's tone curves are not used, and the raw tone curve for the GFX, like almost any camera, is linear.

It's a challenge to get it right between the computer monitor and final print.

--

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[DavidMillier]

To repeat a post from a previous thread of last week...

"In working and printing GFX files there seems to be, for lack of a better term, a denseness in the midtones. It is a darkness that requires adjustment for proper density (lightness/darkness) in printing. I make the adjustment with a custom function in initial processing in C1. Here is what it looks like:


Capture One levels

View: original size

This adjustment retains the black level, lightens the midrange and overall look of the photograph. With some captures the process may reduce the midrange contrast which can be rebuilt with adjustments in curves."

GFX files print dark.

In my experience, GFX files print no darker than files from any other cameras, providing they're adjusted to look the same on the monitor. And how could they? Once the files are converted to colorimetric space, the camera's tone curves are not used, and the raw tone curve for the GFX, like almost any camera, is linear.

It's a challenge to get it right between the computer monitor and final print.

Maybe different if you use some canned preset or LUT film sim?



--
Photo of the day: https://whisperingcat.co.uk/wp/photo-of-the-day/
Website: http://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/ (2022 - website rebuilt, updated and back in action)
DPReview gallery: https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0286305481
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/ (very old!)

 

[KLO82]

Use D50 white point and lower the contrast ratio of the display close to 287.9:1.

 

[JimKasson]

Use D50 white point

Match the display white point to the surround.

and lower the contrast ratio of the display close to 287.9:1.

Contrast ratio to four decimal points?

 

[KLO82]

Use D50 white point

Match the display white point to the surround.

You are right, but people tend to relate bluish-white more with electronic displays.

and lower the contrast ratio of the display close to 287.9:1.

Contrast ratio to four decimal points?

I found this on "Definition & Use of the ISO 12640-3 Reference Color Gamut":

A number of considerations went into the derivation of the
reference color gamut. The first was how to define the white and
black points as these are very important components of the gamut.
Since it was anticipated that the CIELAB reference images would
be widely used for the evaluation of color management systems it
seemed sensible to define the white and black to be consistent with
those defined as the white and black for the reference medium in
ISO 15076-1. These points are specified to have a reflectance
factor of 0.89 and 0.0030911, respectively. While it is likely that
neither of these represent the highest reflectance white, or lowest
reflectance black, obtained in high quality printing systems or
obtainable with surface colors, they are likely to be close to these
values. Thus, this dynamic range provides a reasonable
approximation to the maximum practical gamut.

 

[DavidMillier]

Does that mean that if images for display have a virtual mat around them, you get a more convincing rendition of a paper print if the mat colour is set to be a warmer/yellowish hue rather than neutral white?

Although I was thinking of framing my monitor and including a physical mat in the frame.

But even then, you have the problem of images with unsuitable aspect ratios for today's ubiquitous 16:9 displays. My idea is to sacrifice a bit of screen real estate using a mat with a squarer aspect ratio. But a lot of my images these days are square, so I am going to have to do something with the remaining space. Maybe a grey background, then a virtual square mat inside the physical mat, with a warmish tone to the virtual mat?

 

[DavidMillier]

I took my old 23" HD monitor to my local frame shop to find out how much it would cost to get 4 pieces of black painted moulding made into a simple frame (no backing, no glass, no fixing hardware), literally to take 1 length of the cheapest factory made moulding, cut into 4 pieces, cut mitre joints and glue it together.

£177.08

I laughed.

It's this stuff:

Loading…

www.lionpic.co.uk

Online cost £22, pre-cut and mitred. All I'd have to do is glue it together.