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Dear FPN friends, This is more of a technical issue on Ink reviews. It deals with the colour of your ink and the difference between the real written text and the results on your screen in your post. You might have noticed a difference sometimes…. The written text is much more beautiful in your hand than on the screen. I hereby show you an example of what Bookman wrote me and present the solution I found. In a reply to my review of De Atramentis Document Ink Dark blue our Fountain Pen friend Bookman posted the following: Posted 07 May 2014 - 17:37 Thanks for your review. It is curious and frustrating that, looking through all the reviews and all the photos of handwriting with this ink, there is no consistency in the color so that I can definitely say I have a vague idea of what this ink looks like on paper. Your photos make me want to run out and buy this ink right now. My favorite ink color is dark blue shading slightly toward purple, and that is what I'm seeing in your photos on my monitor. Don't tease me, bro. Is that a fair description of the color: dark blue shading toward purple? Edit: In hindsight, I see that I had looked at the photos and reviews for Document Blue and not Dark Blue. I apologize for the error. But my question remains the same. Mr Bookman struck a delicate issue there, as colour trueness can be a major problem in the days of computers and digital photography. I am a hobby photographer and I know a little bit on this subject, I only know a little though, since I am an amateur but may be the pros can help or improve me here. I will try to explain some of the background of the problem with depicting colours of your ink on a monitor. The first bit is a very technical part on the background of photography and the trueness of the colour presented on your screen. As I can imagine it can be very boring. If you are not interested, simply ignore this part and jump to the part where I present my solution which is maybe more interesting. To make this easy for you I have made the technical part blue and the solution part black… Simply jump for black Colours and photos, how it works One photo taken, 2 Monitors, and a print... a world of difference… The problem today in the era of digital photography is that every camera and every monitor processes photos in a different way. The same photo can have different looking colours on two monitors. How did that happen? In the early days life for the amateur photographer, say you and me, was simple. You made your photos brought them to photo studio for a print and we were all jolly happy with the result. In those days the only thing we as amateur photographers could do few more than this- . Only a few things influenced the results. · Optics the quality of the lens · The Film: There were major companies like Agfa, Fuji and Kodak for example. Each company had their own way of making films resulting in a minor difference of colour hue between the companies · The photo print studio Though there were differences between the films of the above mentioned companies and differences between the print studios, the results were more or less the same. That is if you take the same film, say Kodak, to the same studio the photos were likely to be equal on the different prints. Back to the Future… Most of us (amateurs) use digital cameras now and only some professionals use films in for example technical cameras. This causes a few problems: 1. Every camera (brand) uses different photo sensors. These sensors have different way of recording and saving the image and it’s colours 2. Every monitor has a different way of presenting the image and the colours. Even in the same monitor colours can be depicted differently from time to time. They therefore need regular calibration by software or a calibrating machine 3. Photoshop and others. Today even amateurs use these programs and may sometimes heavily influence the result. It is possible to put the face of Paris Hilton on the body of Oprah Winfrey (guess they are both not happy with that) 4. Surrounding light In modern photography few things have to be considered if you want a photo to depict the truth, as seen by a human in ‘life circumstances’. The human eye can differ between more contrast and many more colours and details. Humans are wonder machines! 1. Most cameras mainly use 2 different ways to register a photo. JPEG and RAW format. JPEG has the advantage of smaller files which are easily exchangeable through E-mail. RAW can be compared to film negatives. It records all details of a picture only limited by the sensor and optic limitations. Though they produce larger files, RAW has a major advantage over JPEG! It can be much more processed because of the registration of all details. Like a film it has ‘to be developed’ using RAW conversion software. 2. As I described above, colour depiction differs from monitor to monitor and from time to time within the same monitor. To tackle this and to present the colours, ‘as neutral as possible’, Monitors need to be calibrated frequently. This can be achieved with a machine like the Spyder calibrators I will put in a link in case you’re interested in one) These give the best results, The other option is not as good as the machine but it is free. This software has a disadvantage over the machine; YOU have to manipulate the monitor settings. Good free software is Calibrize. I will put in a link. It is not only good for your Ink reviews but for your normal photos as well. www.calibrize.com 3. Photoshop and others. I already described that the photographer can influence the end result beyond the truth… Oprah Hilton. There are several ways of colour registration and imaging, each with a different colour spectrum. Best known is RGB the system used by your camera, it mixes Red Yellow and Green resulting in a colour spectrum of 256 colours. In Photoshop there is also the CMYK model. It mixes Cyan Magenta Yellow and black. It is mainly used for posting pictures in magazines. So forget about this since it is much nicer to send someone a handwritten letter with your beloved ink. The goal here is to present the colour of the ink as realistic as possible. To achieve this I will explain this later in the solution part. 4. Surrounding light. First you have to differ between artificial and natural light (daylight). A normal neon tube has a totally different colour tone than sunlight for example. Talking about sunlight. The colour temperature (tone) of light, usually expressed using the “Kelvin Colour temperature Scale” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature has a massive influence on the presentation of colours. There is a great difference between the light sources and also a difference in colour temperature during the day if you are using natural light. Photos taken on a sunny day at noon have less colour depth than on a cloudy day (and very high contrast). On the same sunny day the colours appear warmer (more reddish or yellowish) than ones taken in the late afternoon. You have to take this in consideration if you make photographs (of your ink). But this problem can be tackled. I will explain this later. Down here I posted 2 photos to show you the differences as mentioned in the text above So far the technical and boring part Now for all you Ink lovers I hope that I did not bore your to death with the technical stuff. If you are still among ‘the living’, just read what I do to give you the most beautiful and realistic results in my future ink reviews. What do I do and what can you do to present your ink colours as real as possible. Ask not what the computer can do for you; ask what you can do for your computer · I make both a photo and a scan · I develop the RAW photo using the Raw Therapee software http://raw-therapee.en.softonic.com/ . I then adjust the White Balance to achieve a neutral colour temperature. I do this by using the Eye Dropper tool to click on a white part of the paper (make sure your paper is white) · In Photoshop I adjust the brightness and contrast using the levels tool. I slide the sliding buttons for the dark and light areas to the beginning of the pyramid curve. · I use the same steps for all the ink photos · You might consider changing the image size · I save the photo as a JPEG high quality file · I compare the result with the scan · I then upload the photo in Photobucket www.photobucket.com and put in a link in my review · I compare the review with my hand written text By doing so I hope to present the colours of the ink as in the most realistic (colour true) way. Hopefully this results in best way of showing the ink with all its brilliance. I used this method for the first time in a reply on my review on De Atramentis Document Ink https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php/topic/266158-de-atramentis-document-ink-dark-blue/ The next review with this method is my review of the lovely Pelikan 4001 Violet ink. This is it dear FPN Friends. I hope it was informative and helpful. Beware I am just an amateur giving its best. All input by professionals or just you ink lovers is welcome. I kindly invite you to look the review of Pelikan 4001 Violet. I will post it today and it is the first full review that uses the above described method. By the way I have posted 2 more detail photos to show the difference between processed and un processed photos at the bottom of this review Have a nice day Peter Not processed Processed Warmest Regards, Peter