At the Photo Guild we have been projecting digital images for several years. Last year we purchased a Canon Realis SX6 projector to replace our old projector. This projector supports up 1400 x 1050 resolution and AdobeRGB. We had the projector profiled in September at the start of our fall season but we had many complaints about the colour of the projected images.

Recently I received an upgrade to my spectrophotometer at work including a license for creating ICC profiles for projectors. This was an excellent opportunity to test the new spectrophotometer.

To create a good projector profile it needs to be profiled with same setup as it will normally be used. To accomplish this, Elio Dolente, the current president of the Guild and I booked the auditorium at the Museum of Natural History where the Guild meetings are held. One the problems we have is that members borrow the projector and change the settings and then the profile is no longer valid.

The Guild has a MacBook Pro to use but most of the members use PCs and our competition software only works with Windows so we use Windows XP on the Mac. Windows can only support one monitor profile while Mac OS X can support multiple profiles for monitors and attached projectors. Windows has to be setup so it knows which is the primary monitor and the profile is loaded for this monitor. The Mac uses an nVidia video card and we had the nVidia control panel loaded in Windows XP. While this helped, it took some experimenting to understand how the nVidia driver worked with the monitor and projector. We eventually determined how to make the projector the primary monitor and it also fix some of the problems we were having with screen resolution. The MacBook is 1440 x 900 and the Canon projector is 1400 x 1050.

After setting up the laptop we setup the projector. The projector supports sRGB, AdobeRGB, movie, presentation as well as many custom settings. We reset the projector to the factory defaults and tested sRGB and AdobeRGB. We decided sRGB was the best choice for our base setting. Once these choices were made we profiled the projector. The results were much better than our previous results.

At the next competition the reviews were excellent and the members were pleased with the results. We still had 3-4 images where the reds are over saturated but I need to check these images to see if it is a problem with the projector or the images. I suspect it is the images as 95% of images had excellent colour.