Monitor Blindness

Monitor blindness is a common form of color blindness. Both are blind to certain colors. The blindness can have serious impact on your giclée prepress work. You need to be able to see color accurately because you can't work with something you can't see, at least not yet; and although these may be cosmic overtones vibrating all around us it's the tones in our giclée prints that are important. That's why we use two monitors at Vashon Island Imaging... one CRT and one LCD.

In the OS set the display to clone so that the same desktop appears on each monitor. When you do that you will be surprised to see how different the displays look. For the moment, resist calling one better than the other. How the displays look to you is not as important as their 'WYSIWIG' qualities, which are what we are after (What You See Is What You Get).

Using two monitors you will get two benefits: better health and better quality giclée output. What more could you want?

You'll get better health because you by using the LCD for all but critical color work you won't fry your eyes as much. Better quality giclée prints will also result because a CRT will let you work on more 'rare tones' than the LCD.

Rare tones are colors that most output devices can't show... that is why they are rare. Giclée prints show more colors than others, so they have more rare tones to offer... but you don't get them automatically because they have to be developed with prepress work. You see it most often in the lightest and darkest tones... that is what separates the wheat from the chaff in the printing world.


CRT monitors have a larger color space than LCD displays. Both types come in a spectrum of quality levels and you get what you pay for. Personally, I shop the second hand markets in search of old CRTs whose 'guns' are still firing at full power. You can usually get a sense of that by trying to use the monitor's settings to make some basic adjustments. If there doesn't seem to be any 'range' than one or more of the RGB guns may be on the way out. For years I have been working off a set of six Sun Microsystems graphic work station monitors that I picked up for $25 each!

The display of a CRT has a different 'quality' too because its pixels are phosphors being excited by electrons beamed at them by the RGB guns whereas LCD display pixels are clusters of three liquid crystal cells that filter light passing through them from a back-lit light source (think of colors glass beads on a light box). Each has pixels that are composed of three 'sub-pixels', one each for red, green and blue.


There are frequently two greens because green is a 'weak' color and many capture & output devices have trouble with green. They have trouble with all primary colors actually because each puts out a different level of energy.


Different manufacturers handle the 'light-power' differences between red, green and blue in different ways and with different levels of success. It is not rocket science as any trip to the TV store will reveal... every television's picture quality will be slightly different than all the others. Why this happens is less important that realizing that is does happen and that your neighbor's monitors and TVs are going to make pictures look different than your own. That is why God created color management.

As giclée prepress artists we are most concerned with the accuracy of the WYSIWYG in our monitors. We profile them and constantly tweak them to insure that we have control over our giclée printing machines. The goal is to be able to control precise amounts of ink-flow adjustment because we're often dealing with changes of 1% or 2%. That can make all the difference between a full rich highlight and a blown out one. You can see an example in the picture below.


Every picture needs prepress work to adjust the tones in a master picture file to the type offered by the output device. Every device can only show or print a certain number of colors. Some can show more than others. The more the merrier. Giclée offers the most colors and the finest detail, which is why it is preferred for fine-arts and museum quality graphics printing.

Suppose we say that a giclée printer can produce 1000 colors. To work on pictures for the printer it would be nice to see all 1000 colors, right? CRT monitors show more colors than LCD displays, so your wish is more likely to come true with a good CRT. In fact, if you work with an LCD monitor, it would be the equivalent of being able to see only half the colors that that giclée printing machine can produce. What happens to the other half? That's hard to say but you can count on them being either absent or 'unaccounted for'. But the reverse is also true and that is why having an LCD monitor cloning your CRT display is very handy. What if, for example, a client who simply loved your giclée work asks for a copy to put on their website? This happens frequently at Vashon Island Imaging and we offer Web file prepress as a very inexpensive service for artists and photographers we print for who all have website needs as well as giclée needs.

When you turn your attention to the LCD you will be surprised at how much prepress needs to be done to develop the image and 'flatten it out' so that it looks right in the smaller color space of the LCD display. The smaller the color space, the more saturated and contrasty the overall look. It's the reverse of using sRGB to hype the colors in a giclée print. Now you're working to lower the contrast while maintaining and possibly building up color while doing so. There's a pattern to the prepress work adapting giclée print files to Web or AV display use. You may even be able to make a PhotoShop 'Action' that will faithfully execute the most basic prepress adjustments for 'Webbing' a fine arts image file at the touch of a button.

Actually, I stumbled upon almost everything in this blog because we originally decided to clone displays to preserve investments in our health and hardware. You only get one set of eyes. They are irreplaceable so why fry them when you don't need to. The same applies to CRTs. It is difficult to find CRTs because most shops don't sell them anymore. So we decided to try to reduce the clock time we put on ours by not using them for non-color-critical work, which can be more than half of the prepress time and all of the post-print processing and archiving time. It was when the two were side by side and cloned that we had the OMG moment.

You can avoid monitor blindness (and possibly your own) with this simple side-by-side set-up. While you're at it, if you wear glasses now may be the time to get a new set with the correct settings for your new eye-to-monitor distance. You'll be sitting another 12 inches or so back in your chair due to the wider landscape. In my book Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée I recommend that people have a separate pair of very high quality glasses made just for your giclée prepress work. Your eye wear should be as crystal clear, glare free and optically pure as possible. Remember, your eyes are part of the WYSIWYG equation.