As a photographer I always try to show my images in the best possible light, wether in print or on screen, but there’s one place that’s almost sure to deliver unpredictable results and that’s when the images are projected for a big audience with a digital projector. All too often the crafted files take on a new life on screen with excessive contrast and somewhat saturated colours in places you least expect it, but why?
Projectors are designed to show presentations
The problems come down to the intended use of most projectors, making presentations legible – business presentations at that. To do this they take the approach that black text, white slide backgrounds are best having as much contrast as possible to make the text more readable. Then the garish colours beloved of powerpoint users are intensified to make pie charts have distinct sections in different colours – without much care for the accuracy of the colours. So what you have is a machine designed to mess with images it shows, and photos with smooth gradations and subtle contrast are candidates for banding in the the smooth gradually changing colours, contrast enhancement in subtle details and other such nasties, but there is a way to avoid this on some projectors.
Setting XEED SX-80 Mk II to sRGB mode
I’m using a Canon XEED SX80 Mk II projector in my training sessions since it provides great brightness, excellent colour and most importantly it has an sRGB mode of operation. The sRGB mode tells the projector not to mess with the contrast, colours or anything in my pictures. I’ve found that with a good profile in a consistent environment my projected images are better than the ones on some profiled laptop displays. Sometimes I’ve loaned the projector to a fellow photographer or photoshop trainer and it makes their training easier as the phrase “well you can’t see it on the projector but on my screen it’s…” doesn’t become part of their training, the projector shows what they intend.
So if you connect your computer to a projector to show your images make sure to find out how the projector will treat your files and look for the sRGB mode on the projector which is designed to make them look as you expect. My XEED projector has Photo mode, but this also enhances the image based on Canon engineers ideas of how it should look, it’s often fine, but the consistency is what I want.
My projector is profiled, surely it won’t mess with my pictures now?
If you think that colour profiling your projector will fix the problems of the projector messing with images you are wrong. In the regular modes the projector is changing how it performs for each image depending on it’s content. If you want to work in a colour managed environment then it’s essential that the projector doesn’t interpret each image individually since any created profile is only valid for the profiling images, not your photos.
If you have never seen your images projected large on good quality high resolution projector then you owe it to yourself to find a way to trial one of the Canon XEED projectors, several large photo institutions have all but standardised on them for competitions and exhibitions.