Digital Light & Color

If you purchase an inexpensive Kodak Q-13 step wedge and print the simulated version you can download from our web site, you should be able to compare them, but this will not take into effect differing DMAX and DMIN values.

You can't determine this from the profile - it depends on the printer and the printer driver as well as the profile since they all work together as a system. The only way to determine the gamma is to print a test chart and read it with a densitometer.

First the TRC flags in a monitor profile may either be a simple gamma value or a LUT (TRC stands for tone reproduction curve). sRGB actually uses a table because it treats the first few values different from a standard gamma curve although you would be hard-pressed to notice the difference. Printer ...

No, the control points are customized to the tone ranges. Increasing the contrast of the highlights does necessarily decreased their average brightness however since white is fixed; similarly increasing contrast for shadows lightens them on average.

I have not used Photomatix, but the new Stack Images command is designed to automate the process of combining bracket exposures to produce a high dynamic range image. There is a white paper that describes this process in detail.

http://ftp2.bmtmicro.com/dlc/Stack_Images.pdf

There is no vibrancy feature in PWP. Vibrancy is not a technical term - what most people seem to mean is some combination of increased saturation and contrast.

Different color engine? Different handling of profiles on opening files? Different monitor profile?

Nothing has changed in the program that I can think of that would cause what you are seeing if the settings are actually all the same.

To get a good stitch you need to adjust the goemetry of the images - which depends on the lens focal lengths, remove barrel or pincushion distortion, adjust for light falloff, and tweak the registration.

Panoramic stitching software is often more convenient to use than PWP for combining multiple photos into one. This is a complex, specialized function that is best done with specialized software.

No, there is no way to change what the LCD displays. Profiling works by photographing a special target that contains patches of known colors. A profile is then generated that maps the observed colors to their correct values. The profile can then be used to correct subsequent photos. For digital came...