iPad accurate color rendering test: butterflies | macro | landscape
Many photographers use Apple iPad to show their portfolios or photo shoots to clients. The screen of iPad has a great specs including bright back-lit, high resolution, and color display that surpasses lots of laptop dislays. But even the iPad screen has its own peculiar properties which are subject to correct to get the best color display for your photos.
You may get an iPad display profile as described here, by ordering its calibration and profiling, or by downloading the profile here:
Color profile for: iPad | iPad 2 | new iPad
Colors that could be rendered on the iPad screen (black triangle) in comparison to the AdobeRGB color space gamut; the photograph opened in Adobe Photoshop for color conversion.
Assume that you have the right color profile of your iPad. Now you want to convert colors of your image to iPad display profile in Adobe Photoshop. To do that I advise you to rely on Relative Colorimetric intent with black point compensation.
So you should select the menu item Edit > Convert to Profile… that will display the dialog window.
Menu item for color conversion in Adobe Photoshop | Convert to Profile options.
Relative colorimetric intent preserves colors from the source image intact if they can be displayed on the target device (mean iPad), and shifts the colors that are outside of the target device color space. Thanks to that all iPads have an IPS matrix of a high quality, iPad delivers a rich palette of colors. So the quality drop of the converted images should be small.
In the opposite, application of perceptual intent leads to the proportional compression of the source color space to the target one. This could potentially result in surprisingly dimmed colors.
iPad + AdobeRGB | iPad + AdobeRGB + photo
Comparison of iPad and AdobeRGB color spaces gamut; Color transformation while converting image from AdobeRGB to iPad. Blue ovals mark colors that will be adjusted because they are beyond the iPad color displaying capabilities.
For now you have converted an image to the iPad color profile. It’s time to save the file to folder that serves as a source of images to sync. Then synchronize your iPad with iTunes, and it’s done.
It’s possible to create a simple Action for Adobe Photoshop that will perform with your images all color conversion steps automatically in batch.
There are only three color spaces available in Lightroom: sRGB, ProphotoRGB и AdobeRGB. So, if you would like to export images and convert them to iPad color profile simultaneously, you’ll need the print module to select from different color profiles installed in your system and then save your photo(s).
Photos placed above the text as illustrations are adapted for viewing on the original iPad (I cannot afford upgrading my tablet after each release :). So the photos here may look inaccurately on the iPad 2 or the New iPad, and will definitely look wrong on other devices.
Below are pairs of images converted to the iPad color profile and their originals in sRGB. Color distribution of original images is plotted on graphs as well as AdobeRGB (rainbow triangle) and iPad (black triangle) color gamuts.
