Measure viewing booth brightness/color, etc.

[BrianDieckman]

Hello, all.

Short of buying a $3,000+ GL Spectis, how might I measure my viewing booth’s brightness/color, etc?

I seem to remember a monitor calibration software package allowing you to measure “ambient” lighting during the calibration stage (maybe MonacoOPTIX?) but maybe not.

Is there an application that might take input from the i1 and show that kind of information?

I should have just sprung for the JUST Normlicht booth…

-Brian

[BrianDieckman]

It’s better to be lucky than good…

I found today that adJUST from JUST Normlich will allow you to check/adjust viewing booth parameters without performing a calibration…

1. open the application, choose “Softproof” then click “Advanced Settings.”
2. on the left, click “Reveiw” then choose “Check viewing booth”
3. under “ISO reference values” click “Viewing booth for hardcopy comparison only” and click “Measure”
4. follow the prompts then click “Measure” again.

In the application window that pops up, you can see Yxy values, a Kelvin reading with Da and Db along with luminance in lux.

The price is fairly reasonable, though if you’re only going to use it to measure your viewing booths, it may be overkill.

-Brian

[Rick_Hatmaker]

Brian:

We think highly of JUST NormLicht products. You can’t go wrong there.

There is another less expensive way to gather ambient or light booth temperature readings…

Some measurement devices have an ambient sensing head (i.e.: X-Rite i1Display2/Pro, i1Pro/i1Pro2). Unfortunately X-Rite’s latest profiling solution ‘i1Profiler’ doesn’t currently provide an easy correlation to determine temp as did past software (i1Match, Profilemaker v5, etc.). But there are two solutions Pat Herold (Tech Support at CHROMiX) mentioned recently that can help correlate this information for you:

ColorConverter works on iPad. It is not free, but well worth the small investment. You can get more information at itunes

There’s also Bruce Lindbloom’s site. Not as convenient as an iPad app, but it’s a free option. Click the “Calc” button and choose the CIE Color Calculator.

Not sure this is what you’re looking for, but it might help provide other options.

Rick Hatmaker
CHROMiX

[aaron125]

@BrianDieckman

Hello, all.
Short of buying a $3,000+ GL Spectis, how might I measure my viewing booth’s brightness/color, etc?

I seem to remember a monitor calibration software package allowing you to measure “ambient” lighting during the calibration stage (maybe MonacoOPTIX?) but maybe not.

Is there an application that might take input from the i1 and show that kind of information?

I should have just sprung for the JUST Normlicht booth…
-Brian

There most definitely is an application which will provide all of the functions you’ve requested - and it’s been around for about 10 years (maybe even longer). The app I’m referring to is X-Rite i1Share.
I’ve been using it myself for at least the past 7 or 8 years, originally with an i1pro Rev. B and now with an i1pro2 Rev. E. It works just as well with the i1pro2 as it does with an original i1pro device.

Getting back to your requirements, i1Share allows the user to measure ambient light or flash/strobe light output and the app returns the SPD, brightness (in lumens) and CCT of the light source being measured.

It’s an extremely useful and very handy app whose functionality still hasn’t been equalled, let alone surpassed by any of X-Rite’s current software. The only thing I wish they’d change is that the graph of the light source SPD is incredibly small in size, to the point where it can be difficult to see on very high res screens, such as a 2560x1600 30" screen, the graph is rather small, but one can always take a screenshot and use some sort of interpolation app to make the SPD graph larger and easier to see.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll find i1Share to be just what you’ve been searching for. Hope it helps.

P.S. Did I forget to mention that it’s FREE?

[Patrick_Herold]

Thanks for that. I had forgotten about i1Share. It’s still available from X-Rite:
xrite.com/product_overview.a … wareID=505

[PTKen]

ISO spec says we should set our booths to 500 lux for standard evaluation and 2000 lux for critical color evaluation. Does this need to be revisited? Our old CRT monitors were never brighter than 80-90 cd/m2, but our current LCD monitors are typically calibrated to 120 - 160 cd/m2. The light booth needs to match this brightness in order to make comparisons with print and screen. Are the ISO lux values based on CRT screen brightnesses? OK, the 2000 lux is print to print matching, but what about 500 lux? It seems to me we should increase this value for current technology. How would you calculate the equivalent lux value to match a monitor calibrated at 160 cd/m2 if the viewing distance for the booth is about 2 feet?

[Stefanprofiler]

@PTKen

ISO spec says we should set our booths to 500 lux for standard evaluation and 2000 lux for critical color evaluation. Does this need to be revisited? Our old CRT monitors were never brighter than 80-90 cd/m2, but our current LCD monitors are typically calibrated to 120 - 160 cd/m2. The light booth needs to match this brightness in order to make comparisons with print and screen. Are the ISO lux values based on CRT screen brightnesses? OK, the 2000 lux is print to print matching, but what about 500 lux? It seems to me we should increase this value for current technology. How would you calculate the equivalent lux value to match a monitor calibrated at 160 cd/m2 if the viewing distance for the booth is about 2 feet?

To simulate a light booth on our monitors would require that they have a brightness of 160 cd/m2, theoretically. In practice I find that 120-140 cd/m2 are a better match to a booth that has 500 lux. So in the old bad days with CRT monitors, we were never able to match a light booth.