How Good is My Ancient Sun Workstation Monitor?

In my last post I mentioned an unexpected  advantage of upgrading my desktop--the discovery that  I now had a video driver specifically for my Sun workstation monitor.  Major result--my monitor colors looked brighter and more vivid.  Minor result--a software switch between my manual screen layout--squished in with black borders so the aspect ratio of  a square image is exact--and the driver's more open layout that fills the whole screen.

I began to wonder if I could go from 'this looks better'  and come up with some tests where I could say 'this is exactly how much better" the colors appeared.  Something like I'd attempted after I bought my first digital camera and wanted to reverse engineer how digital cameras worked. Then I photographed a fan of paint cards and compared the swatches to the colors I saw on my monitor.  With mixed results if I remember correctly.

A decade later I now understand why my naive first attempt at color management ended a bit off.  Somewhere in the house is an extra thick tome on the complexities of  eyeball, brain, camera, scanner, printer, press and monitor color processing.  Someday I might even finish reading it. During my last attempt my brain seized up when I hit the complexities of mating CMYK processing with the ink spread on various paper grades during high speed offset printing.

But I did manage to retain a few key facts. The first is color calibrate your monitor. If that is off everything that follow will be meaningless. To correct gross problems you can fiddle with your monitor controls  and attempt to match images you find on the web. But to calibrate accurately you have to buy hardware.

I invested in a Pantone Huey--at the time $99 at my local we-stock-everything craft store.  The Huey has its quirks.  The software in the box dated from the Win 2000 era and did not install on my newer OS.  Once I located the upgrade, more of a hassle to find than it should have been, I couldn't make the 'adjust the contrast and brightness control so the top right circle... etc etc' part of the setup work. In the end I set them to 75% and clicked next. Despite these quirks, the Huey did cleaned my obvious color management problems. Still I never did discover how accurate the color matches were

So I was thinking of getting out the camera and repeating the paint card experiment when I discovered http://www.color-swatches.com .  Which, not surprising, is a site with a data base of paint swatches. They even provide the RGB numbers used to create the swatch and CMYK numbers to print the color cards. Below is an example of what you find there

So all I had to do was collect some paint card.  Unfortunately finding them in stores I happened to pass while doing grocery shopping didn't work out well. Walmart's ColorPlace wasn't in the data base. Home Depot's Glidden had only one swatch on line that matched the cards I took.  In the end I made a trip to Sherwin Williams. It has a swatch for every paint it sells. This combined with larger than normal paint cards printed on thicker than normal paper stock makes it my recommended store for swiping your cards. 

With cards in hand I download a swatch.  And I hit my first technical problem.  Monitors blasts out light. The paint cards, on the other hand, reflect light. Depending on the light quality (intensity, color temp and all that jazz) they will, more often than not, look different than the monitor swatch.  After holding card by the monitor I could say the swatches sort of looked the same. but that wasn't the accurate one-to-one comparison I wanted.

After some fiddling I discovered if I opened the curtains of a window to the left of monitor and angled the card up or down to catch more or less light I could match the intensities.  But I still ended up with a so-so color match.  Close but hardly perfect like in the photo below.

I must confess to spending far too much time fiddling with controls while the answer to the problem stared me in the face.  Quick question. What is causing the green cast on the swatches of the lighter blue paints?  After all Sherwin Williams wouldn't mix a little green pigment in with its expensive blue paints.

All I had to do was carry the card to the window, twist it first to face the window light and then away, to watch it switch between slightly greenish and pure blue. The Wisconsin clear sky sunlight had started out pure. But once it was reflected off the green leaves that shade the patio below the window it had a greenish component.

Problem solved. Color cast in the light.  Factor that out and the match between real object and monitor image colors becomes almost perfect.  Some days life is good.

Or close to good. Measured with Gimp, the RGB numbers on a swatch are what www.color-swatch.com says they should be.  Measure with RawTherapee using its neutral profile, one that is supposed to display an image exactly as shot, and the numbers end up 5 to 9 units lower  So after I post this I should be a good RT user and also post a bug report.

Edit

The  RGB 5-9 off bug is when I save a swash snip in png format. When saved in jpg format the numbers are off by 1.

And not surprising when you think about it, the green colorcast that had me twirling about mentally yesterday depends on the time of day and where the sun is in the sky.  Around noon when trees are in direct sunlight the reflection off the leaves is a problem.  But earlier this morning when I repeated the test and the sun was much lower in the sky the match was so close I could hardly make out the seam where the card touched the monitor swatch.

Ain't color management tricky ... but fun.

No Excuse for Not Posting Anymore

I haven't posted for a while. And while I can't truthfully say this was all due to compute problems,
they did make working with rawTherapee more difficult and time consuming. Bottom line the window's version of RT barely tolerates antique 32 bit computers.

So I have upgraded my desktop from a single core AMD 32 bit CPU  to an almost up to date Intel i5 four core 64 bit CPU. I say almost up to date since my CPU is an i5-2310 and Intel has come out with a slightly faster i5-2320 version. (And yes I do know that the i7 gamer CPU beats almost everything, but I'm not a gamer and right now I think an i7 would be expensive overkill for my photo editing needs.)

Until last Thursday morning upgrading was only a vague I-should-do-it-someday urge. But after grocery shopping my wife decided to stop at the local thrift store to check for vintage bargains. Since I wasn't in the mood to stand around while she worked her way down the clothing racks I went next door to Staples to buy a bag of assorted rubber bands. 

Never got to the rubber bands.  I walked down the computer aisle, stopped to glance at some of the prices and was about to head off to the back of the store to search for the rubber bands, when another customer mentioned "That one is quite the deal." He pointed towards a Dell  Inspiron at the end of the rack sporting  a $230 off sticker. When I looked more closely I saw it was semi-loaded up with 8GB of ram and a 1 TB hard disk.

By then the salesman had joined us. The first customer was only browsing and walked off as I got the full spiel.  The computer was a demo and the last one left in the store.  Because of the Intel CPU upgrade they had first dropped its price by $100. When it hadn't moved, they dropped the price to $230 just that morning. And so on. Ended up with me saying I wanted to do some Internet checking first and he saying he had to reset it to the factory conditions so it would be off the shelf until Friday morning.

I had a day to decide. And since the Internet had mostly nice thing to say about the model--example, in a bench mark/price comparison its i5 2310 CPU came out #1--the desktop ended up on my old kitchen table turned computer bench by Friday afternoon.

A computer bench that won't be as uncluttered until I photograph my next upgrade. As I look around I see--no you don't really want hear the full mess inventory.  {The neatest additions to the mess are two wood turned black walnut tops tumbled over in a curly maple spinning dish. I bought them at an annual Artfair-on-the-Square back when some venders still hand crafted their arty stuff instead of buying it wholesale from Bangladesh or Thailand.}
 
The system has its first addons  I walked out of the store with its wired usb mouse and keyboard under my arm but I hadn't gone more than a few blocks when I spotted a garage sale sign. A garage sale with a $3 wireless mouse and Photo Center keyboard.  At that price how could I pass up the deal--especially when, to sweeten the deal, the owner tossed in a working laptop mouse.

One unexpected improvement affected my Sun workstation monitor, a tank build piece of equipment that weights 70# and must be approaching 20 years old.  The new Intel video chip recognized it as a SUN0567 instead of as a generic monitor  Since its colors now appear both brighter and more vivid, the video chip must be using a special driver.

Viewed from the side the setup isn't as pretty.

 

I pulled out 'big disk' from the old computer to added another 1TB disk space to the system. For  some that might seem a massive amount of storage but 'big disk' is already filled to the top with archived images. Shooting RAW +fine JPG on my Nikon D7000 works out to about 18MB per shutter push which can eat up a TB in a surprisingly short time. That upgrade went fine until I tried to put on the side cover and discovered the old SATA data cable stuck out a mm or ao too far.

A new cable is on order along with two PCI x1 cards to fill up the two empty slots below the wireless card. One is a dual usb 3.0 card to go with a 3TB external drive I had already bought.  When I said 'big disk' was jammed full of archived image, that meant it held the  digital photos I'd shot and saved until last summer. Since then I stored another 417 GB of photo onto another external disk plugged into my laptop. Do love to push that shutter button.

Since my older TV tuner card is old style PCI the other new style x-1 slot will hold an upgrade. This card has two tuners so I can watch and record 1080 pixel high def movies at the same time, maybe useful,  plus a FM tuner that could replace the boom box on the bureau behind me, far less useful. Plus some addition ports like HDMI that may or may not provide better inputs if I decide to explore my D7000's excellent video capabilities.

Who knows, you might end up seeing video posts on this blog,

Mistakes--Serendipitous

By Madison in Febuary standards last Saturday was balmy. Despite the sunny, mid 40's weather my D7000 and I spent the afternoon indoors at the Olbrich Garden photographing the Children of the Rain Forest.

This month's performers were the Hale O Malo Polynesian Dance Group, Their costumes and dances ranged from a New Zealand  Maori war dance to a Tahitian fertility dance. That invocation of human fertility came with a friendly warning, "Do not attempt this at home."

This image was shot during the pictures-with-the-kids session at the end of the show using my new Tamron 18 -270 mm f3.5-5.6 super zoom set at 18mm wide angle.  The manual exposure settings were f8 and 1/200 sec combined with an auto ISO. That ended up at 6400.

Not an optimum or necessary ISO for this image. It could have been much lower.  At 18mm the lens opens at f 3.5. For a static shot a shutter speed of 1/60 sec would have worked. But I had set up the camera for telephoto dance images, 1/200 sec to give a sense of motion without excessive blur and f8 to sharpen up the lens's slightly soft long end. I didn't spot any massive noise problems when I reviewied the screen shots during the shoot so I went with the default settings.

For post processing I downloaded RAW Therapee's latest 64 bit build, version 4.7.01. It doesn't have the new noise reduction routines yet, but it does have enough new features to  justify a build jump from 4.6 to 4.7.  I'll talk about a few newfeatures in this post, plus some older ones that I haven't used much, starting with the big review images in the file browser.

With dance groups I tend to over shoot.  You know, long continuous bursts hoping to capture that perfect combination of step, twirl and jump. This time I filled my 16 GB main card and moved down to my 8GB secondary card. There I found Miss Thumps-Up posing for Mom's perfect snap combined with an interesting environmental background.

Viewing the preview jpgs full size on my laptop screen while using the number and color coded ratings sped up my selection workflow. I ranked my 'maybe images' during a first pass and then fine tuning the selection set. Definitely a winner.

Judging by the curve of the molding board at the top, this image, shot at 18mm, has serious wide angle lens distortion.  So I tried the fix in the Transform/lensgeometry/distortion tab. My first guess, a -0.5 pincushion setting went way over the top. But it did open up ideas for some creative playing around later.

The for real setting was -0.09.  I pulled up a grid Guide Type to provide straight lines as a reference. At the moment the routine bends the image only one way and creates a curved blank area at the bottom. So I used auto fill to clean up that problem. And for those interested in composition rules the Guide Types include rule of thirds, rule of diagonals and several harmonic mean or, as I used to call them, golden sections.

With the proper settings I created an '18mm tamron' default profile that I can call up to automatically correct my wide angle images.

This fixed I tried out a  new profile that came with RT 4.7-- 'default ISO high'. After I applied the profile  it was  'WOW!! Where has all the ISO 6400 noise gone!!?'

Turns out the RT team had done some interesting things but the real WOW maker was my serendipitous mistake. I'd been working with the jpg not the NEF file, a jpg that had already gone through one pass of the Nikon D7000 excellent in-camera noise reduction routine.

I posted twice last August about how well RAW Therapee works as a jpg editor   My mistake turned up another use- one that is especially helpful to someone who shoots flash-less low light party and people photos.

Here is the most interesting settings in the 'default ISO high' profile along with my modifications.

I left the Impulse Noise Reduction at 80. Luminance comes up as 0 so I set that to 20. Gamma 1.2 has the effect of shifting noise reduction into the shadows where it is needed the most. As usual the effect of all this is to blur detail (bad) while removing noise (good).

The RT folk's ingenious addition is to use 'contrast by detail levels' to recover a surprising amount of the blurred detail. The default values are 0 (finest) =1.00 and the next level '1' =2.00 but at the time I was thinking noise rather than detail;  So I may have gone a little too far fiddling with the sliders and cut out slightly more detail than the noise reduction needed. Either way, the noise cleanup and preserved detail  on this ISO 6400 image is dramatic.

How dramatic. Here are my results. And unlike the Tahitian fertility dance you should definitely try this at home.

The image on the left is from the NEF using the current noise reduction routines. It has the highest noise. It also has the most preserved detail in the girl's hair so I could have pushed its noise reduction harder.  The middle image is the jpg from the D7000 using its default jpg (Sd) and noise reduction (norm) settings. While I wouldn't have called it bad a week ago, now it looks flat and washed out next to the RT image on the right. I lost some detail in the hair but with the noise now so low I can print it up large, perhaps to 11 by 14, without showing objectionable noise. Not shabby for an ISO 6400 image.

Lesson learnt. At the moment there is no advantage working from NEFs using RT. Not that this is a massive bash; the D7000 has one of the best in-camera noise reduction algorithms around. And judging from the comments in the forum, RT should get better soon. See Issue 1052: New luminance NR algorithm  http://code.google.com/p/rawtherapee/issues/detail?id=1052  for up to date details.

With a CPM member's show coming up and several low-light images I'm considering exhibiting, it is time for some serious post processing. Will let you know how everything works out.

PS. The line profiles were taken off the wall over the girl's shoulder.