Eye-One Beamer
Those of us who rely on digital projectors to produce accurate tone and color — such as when we’re teaching Photoshop classes — always experience a moment of truth when we see the projected image and calculate the fudge factor we’ll have to put into all our Photoshop moves to show the audience something that makes visual sense. Some of us even joke about the unavailability of dinner-plate-sized sucker cups to calibrate the projector.
The $1,595 Eye-One Beamer isn’t a dinner-plate-sized sucker cup, but it is a lifesaver for anyone who needs to get accurate tone and color out of a digital projector. The Eye-One Beamer bundle includes the Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer with the ambient light head, adapters for LCD and CRT monitors, and an ingenious holder that sits on top of the projector and allows you to point the Eye-One at the screen. The accompanying software lets you calibrate and profile LCD and CRT monitors and, you guessed it, digital projectors.
Since this is the first product of its kind, I don’t have much of a basis for comparison, but it’s certainly easier and more reliable than using tools such as Adobe Gamma or ColorSync’s Default Calibrator to try to wrestle projectors into shape, and the results I’ve obtained thus far have been quite wonderful. Subtle corrections in Photoshop, such as dodging or burning by 1/3 of a stop, or changing the green/magenta balance by making a 1-level correction with Curves, are clearly communicated to the audience with no fudging. Having used it, I can’t imagine going back to uncalibrated projectors. The Beamer package also includes a plug-in that adds color management capabilities to Microsoft PowerPoint, which isn’t enough to convert this PDF and Keynote user, but is handy nevertheless. You can add the Beamer (software and hardware accessory) to any of the other spectrophotometer bundles for $595.
ProfileMaker Pro 4.1.5
Last but by no means least in this plethora of updates is the latest version of GretagMacbeth’s flagship profiling software package, ProfileMaker Pro 4.1.5. Some of the new features in ProfileMaker Pro are aimed at fairly hard-core color geeks, such as support for measuring and evaluating the FOGRA Media Wedge 2.0 process control target. Likewise, the added support for X-Rite’s DTP 41 strip-reading spectrophotometer and the return of support for X-Rite’s DTP-92 Monitor Optimizer are mainly of interest to owners of those instruments, but two major enhancements play to a wider audience.
First, ProfileMaker 4.1.5 contains an entirely new monitor profiling module for both CRT and LCD monitors. It uses the same technology as Eye-One Match 2.0, but offers much more in the way of controls and options, including the ability to set a specific white luminance in candelas per square meter (so you can set a white luminance for a CRT that is bright enough to be comfortable, but not so bright that it wears the monitor out prematurely), and a mode that allows you to set a white point manually using the monitor’s controls, then preserve it through the calibration and profiling process (which is useful if you want to set a monitor white to match a specific paper stock).
As with Eye-One Match, I found the monitor calibrations and profiles produced by ProfileMaker Pro 4.1.5 a huge improvement over previous offerings from GretagMacbeth, with none of the clipping of shadow values that plagued the older technology. Now the monitor profiles are up to the standard of GretagMacbeth’s output and scanner profiles.
The second new feature is the ability to tailor output profiles for viewing under a light source measured using Eye-One Share and the Eye-One Pro with the ambient light head. This is an advanced feature, to be sure, but if you need to tailor output for specific lighting conditions (rather than for the D50 illuminant that the ICC takes as its standard, but which is almost impossible to replicate with real, physical lighting), it works extremely well in a variety of situations. Even “standard” D50 proofing lights vary considerably in their spectrum from vendor to vendor, so tailoring the profile to your specific proofing light can produce subtle improvements in color matches. In a more radical scenario, you can create output profiles tailored to the lighting requirements of a specific job — restaurant menus that will be viewed under subdued incandescent and candlelight, or gallery prints that will be viewed under gallery lighting.
Sorting It All Out
With the Eye-One spectrophotometer, GretagMacbeth has a wonderfully versatile and relatively inexpensive measurement device that has become even more versatile through the addition of the ambient light head and Beamer options. The new software bundles seem to address specific markets better than the old ones did: Eye-One Photo is great for the digital photographer who simply needs to profile displays and RGB printers; Eye-One Publish adds scanner and CMYK profiling; and the Eye-One Pro bundle, which includes ProfileMaker Pro, addresses the needs of the most advanced color management users. The improvements and enhancements are entirely welcome (and in the case of the monitor profiling modules, somewhat overdue). As an owner of several more-expensive GretagMacbeth instruments, I’ve been surprised at just how often I end up using the Eye-One — it’s simply a very convenient instrument.
For sheer value for money, it’s hard to beat the Eye-One Photo bundle, which is ideal for all those users who print to non-PostScript inkjet printers. GretagMacbeth offers upgrade paths that let you add any of the capabilities discussed here as and when you need them. But the Eye-One has attracted support from almost all the other vendors of profiling tools, something that GretagMacbeth has taken pains to encourage, so you aren’t locked into a single-vendor solution unless you want to be. As single-vendor solutions go, though, GretagMacbeth’s is one of the strongest.
Read more by Bruce Fraser.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on July 1, 2003
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