Getting started with virtual color proofing is easier than ever. Yesterday, virtual color proofing required many different hardware and software devices, constant intervention and fine tuning. Today, digital technology has refined the process to just a few key components and automated many steps in the workflow.
Mac OS X Tiger
With Mac OS X Tiger, and now Leopard (OSX 10.5x) it is faster, easier and more affordable than ever to achieve consistent color — a prerequisite for accurate virtual color proofing. Mac OS X Tiger takes a system-wide and always-on approach to color by integrating ColorSync, based on the International Color Consortium (ICC) standard for color management, into every phase of the workflow: capture, edit and output. This ensures that color accurately translates from one device to another across your entire workflow.
Apple Mac Pro
The foundation of your virtual color proofing platform, the Mac Pro provides the computational power to realize all of your creative ideas in any medium. With its 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors and PCI Express architecture, it radically increases data bandwidth system-wide and introduces an all-new set of performance features never before seen on a desktop computer. The Mac Pro delivers the multitasking power you need to realize your ideas as fast as you can imagine them. Plus, you get all the power and ease of use of the Mac OS X operating system.
Apple Cinema Displays
Apple pioneered the move to LCD technology in 2001 with an award-winning line of all-digital, active-matrix, flat-panel displays and has since built the industry’s most innovative, elegant displays. Based on the industry’s best LCD technology, the Apple Cinema Display line delivers performance superior to that of any CRT-based display. Compared with other LCD monitors, the Apple line stands out in numerous ways: its wide-aspect design, DVI connector, integrated FireWire and USB ports, the ultrathin bezel, brushed-aluminum enclosure and VESA mountable and adjustable stand.
The Cinema Display’s total color gamut — number of viewable colors — is perceptibly larger than that of the CRT. You can use the Cinema Display in normally-lit settings — not darkened rooms — with little reduction in the dynamic range of colors being displayed.
Brightness
When designing CRT displays, engineers must always make a trade-off between brightness and sharpness. If the CRT screen is made brighter, the text typically becomes less sharp. That’s because CRT technology is based on light-emitting phosphors. As a given phosphor glows brighter, it becomes harder to distinguish it from neighboring phosphors. The result is that adjacent pixels become less distinct and therefore less sharp.
Place an Apple Cinema Display side by side with a conventional CRT display and you’ll immediately notice that the Cinema Display’s colors appear more vivid and lifelike, because its total color gamut — number of viewable colors — is perceptibly larger than that of the CRT. The benefit of this larger apparent gamut is that you can use the Cinema Display in normally-lit settings — not darkened rooms — with little reduction in the dynamic range of colors being displayed (that is, without the colors becoming washed out).
Flat-panel displays turn each pixel on and off using transistors directly in the screen that activate the liquid crystal layer with electricity. This means an LCD can be made very bright without reducing the clarity of text or graphics. A key benefit of a bright screen is that it allows you to view fine details and subtle color differences even in well-lit office and home environments.
Contrast
Another benefit of increased brightness is better contrast ratio. Contrast ratio is the ratio between the whitest white and the blackest black on a display — its dynamic range. Because flat-panel displays are brighter, they can create brighter whites, thus instantly increasing the contrast ratio.
Sharpness and Lack of Flicker
In a CRT, the energy from an electron beam hitting the phosphors creates light, which fades after the beam sweeps to other parts of the screen. The sharpness of a CRT is determined by the size of the area excited by the electron beam. To minimize the apparent flicker of the phosphor being excited and fading, a good CRT monitor refreshes each part of the screen at an extremely fast rate — 75 times a second or more.
At those speeds, however, it’s difficult to control the spot size of the electron beam and therefore to create a sharp transition between dark and light areas. So CRT engineers again face a trade-off: a high refresh rate and a sharp image are difficult to implement simultaneously at high resolutions.
Modern CRT displays with high refresh rates have minimized flickering, which is widely accepted to cause eyestrain and associated headaches. LCDs, however, offer an even greater advantage: They have no electron beam rapidly “painting” an image on the screen, line by line. Each and every pixel on an LCD turns on and off independently whenever needed. This means you can have consistent, sharp, flicker-free color for a stable view of your virtual proof.
