Well, I’ll begin this post by a disclaimer :
I’m in not way affiliated with Rising Sun Research, and I won’t get a penny if you buy cineSpace.
I’m just an happy cineSpace user, and cineSpace saved my ass on a lot of occasions.
That being said, let’s begin this “tutorial”.
cineSpace is in fact a suite of small applications :
cineProfiler
equalEyes
cineCube
are the 3 most important.
probeServer and the shake/nuke/fusion plugins are not going to be covered here.
Step one : getting a profile of your monitor
You first need a monitor probe. I personally use the Gretag MacBeth Eye1 Display 2. But you can find a list of supported probes here : http://cinespace.risingsunresearch.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79
Disable all your screensavers and power management sytems that might turn your monitor off.
Launch cineProfiler. You’ll be asked which monitor type you want to profile.
Always choose the “Normal” profile length. The quick one is good for compositing or matte painting, but for color grading we need the most accurate profile we can get.
Click “Start”, then click “Detect Probe”.
Move the white square windows on the monitor you want to calibrate and follow the instruction to calibrate your probe. For the Gretag MacBeth Eye1 stick it on the white patch, click “Calibrate”
Follow the monitor preparation instruction.
On the bottom left, under the start button, you have 2 small buttons :
“Use default profile” or “Select profile”.
Here is what Rising Sun recommend :
If you are profiling for general HD/video/multimedia use we recommend using our default profile as your optimisation target. Otherwise check the Select profile radio button and choose the output profile you will be working with as your optimisation target. Your choice will depend upon the target you intend working with on the profiled monitor
Then click on “Start”.
Follow the instructions and put your contrast to 100% and dim you brightness until ou only see 3 bars, click on “Continue”
Be sure to uncheck the “Have Bias Control” option if you don’t have bias control over the monitor you are profiling.
And if you don’t have separated RGB gain conlor either, you better skip the entire optimization process as it will be useless and click on “Skip Optimization”.
Else, click on “Start Optimization”, the game here is trying to get all the sliders on 0, or the nearest possible value if you can’t make it.
Once you have a satisfying result click on Start Profiling, wait until the profile is done and save it.
Step two : generate a LUT for Final Touch
Once you have your monitor profile, cineSpace can use that profile in addition to a target profile to match a precise color space.
First you can use equalEyes, which is a good little tools but only work as a 1D LUT. Giving you a “near but not perfect” idea of what your images will look in the target color space. Useful when reviewing an image with Graphic Converter, or looking at a quicktime in quicktime player.
Then you have cineCube, which will generate you a 3D LUT for the target software, in our case Final Touch.
cineCube is a command line only software, so you have to open a terminal, go to the /Applications/CineSpace/ directory, launch cineCube with about 2 lines of parameters and so…
A typical cineCube line looks like :
./cineCube -target /Applications/CineSpace/target-profile/kodak_2383.xml -monitor /Applications/CineSpace/monitor-profile/mymonitor.xml -bits 5 -type finaltouch > /Users/MyUser/Library/FinalTouch Items/bin/LUT/kodak_2383.mga
Sounds boring doesn’t it?
Well, as I had to generate 4 or 5 LUT in a row every 14 days (you’ll better profile your monitor each 14 days for accuracy purpose), I’ve written a little GUI for cineCube. you can find it at :
http://www.10bitlog.com/files/cineCubeGUI.zip
The only thing you have to do for it to work is copying the licence file Rising Sun sent you in your hard disk root (just double click on your hard disk on the desktop and copy the .lic file here), because I tryed to use the environment variable to find the license where is is located but couldn’t make it. Be careful, I said COPY not MOVE.
Also, when saving your output LUT in the GUI, don’t forget to add the .MGA extension or Final Touch won’t see the generated LUT.
This was written in AppleScript using XCode, so if anyone is whishing to take a look at the source to improve it, just send me an email at jluc@10bitlog.com
The GUI is not Universal Binary yet, but who care it’s light and performances are not an issue. I’ll compile an Universal Binary once I take the time to installe XCode 2.4
Best regards,
Jean-Luc Gason
http://www.10bitlog.com
original URL:
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/223/137