When is colour matching critical?

[tlitody]

With the recent discussion on NEC monitors it has set me wondering when is it really necessary to get perfect colour matching between screen and print?
Can you give any instances where perfect colour matching between subject and print it is really necesssary.

[Mark Barendt]

When you sell a print based off seeing it on the screen.

[Preston]

Print/Screen matching, when it is as close as possible, saves time, ink, paper, and reduces frustration.

I must admit that obtaining a 'perfect' match between screen and print may not be possible because the print is reflective, and the screen is transmissive. However, the closer we can get, the better.

--P

[Kimberly Anderson]

when you make your living off of your imagery that appears in print or on the web...or if you are selling fine art prints. IOW, basically all the time that you actually care how your images look.

I spend a lot of time calibrating monitors and printers in my classroom situations too. How can I be expected to teach color correction if the student can't see their results.

Accurate color is one of my specialities, so I tend to care more than some.

[Frank Petronio]

Getting it 95% accurate isn't that hard, it's that last 5% that's a bitch. And in most cases it doesn't matter. Especially with landscapes that are so overwhelmingly popular on this forum, which are usually very forgiving and still look good even if they don't match screen/print. At least they look good to everyone except the nervous photographer!

(Greenery is easy, sand is hard....)

Where it starts to get critical is for commercial work. Imagine dresses on a grey seamless but with different lighting. Now you have to make the grey seamless look grey on every page, even if the photos were shot under different light quality and situations. Add a fleshtone for extra complications.... That's where it gets... fussy, to the single digit in adjustments.

[JeffKohn]

With the recent discussion on NEC monitors it has set me wondering when is it really necessary to get perfect colour matching between screen and print?
Can you give any instances where perfect colour matching between subject and print it is really necesssary.

Maybe I'm not fully understanding the question, because the answer seems obvious to me. Why would you ever not want or care about color matching? After all, it doesn't do much good to get the image exactly the way you want it on-screen, if you have no idea what the print will look like.

There's no such thing as perfect color matching between print and display; but a well-calibrated workflow can get you really close, and have enough consistency that with experience you'll learn how what you see on-screen translates to print.

Calibration alone isn't a silver bullet though. You can only go so far with calibrating a low-end display. Higher quality displays will calibrate better and give you a closer match to print. Additionally, newer wide-gamut displays will better show you the colors that today's inkjet printers are capable of reproducing (which go well beyond sRGB or even AdobeRGB in some cases).

And it's not just an issue for color work. Color gamut isn't an issue for monochrome images, of course; but grayscale tracking and linearity are definitely issues. Displays with a hardware LUT will give you better grayscale with much less chance of banding.

[z_photo]

when shooting ad photos containing kodak yellow

[tlitody]

Maybe I'm not fully understanding the question, because the answer seems obvious to me. Why would you ever not want or care about color matching? After all, it doesn't do much good to get the image exactly the way you want it on-screen, if you have no idea what the print will look like.

There's no such thing as perfect color matching between print and display; but a well-calibrated workflow can get you really close, and have enough consistency that with experience you'll learn how what you see on-screen translates to print.

Calibration alone isn't a silver bullet though. You can only go so far with calibrating a low-end display. Higher quality displays will calibrate better and give you a closer match to print. Additionally, newer wide-gamut displays will better show you the colors that today's inkjet printers are capable of reproducing (which go well beyond sRGB or even AdobeRGB in some cases).

And it's not just an issue for color work. Color gamut isn't an issue for monochrome images, of course; but grayscale tracking and linearity are definitely issues. Displays with a hardware LUT will give you better grayscale with much less chance of banding.

I'm making the distinction between perfect matching and good enough because no one except the photographer knows what the true colours were. So it seems no monitor is actually perfect so it's an impossibility so good enough will always do.
I take the points that consistent colour and exact matching for product colours and skin tones is where it's critical. But for landscape where you are not using truly neutral films anyway, I don't see it as critical at all. 95% will do to get a quality landscape print which is close enough to what you see on screen.

[Walter Calahan]

"Can you give any instances where perfect colour matching between subject and print it is really necessary."

When shooting any commercial work where the client wants their product in the image to look exactly was it does in life.

[Frank Petronio]

And then you cheat, like avoiding trying to match across two-page spreads (look at landscapes in coffee-table books - the blue skies rarely match) and other designer-decision practical tricks.

That's why people would try to shoot the entire job from matched emulsions, use only one brand of lenses, always the same strobes, block all ambient light, not mix skin colors in the same photo, etc.