I've been doing digital imaging for over 15 years and in that time, the real weak point has always been the computer display. Being able to actually trust what you see requires an excellent display and of course, proper color management that ensures that your display is accurately profiled.

Today's displays need to have a wide gamut of color and a bright and uniform backlighting but they also need to have the ability to calibrate and profile extremely accurately. Applications like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom base their image display upon that profile and without an accurate one, you really can't trust your own eyes.

For the Camera Raw video tutorial, I chose to use the NEC LCD2690WUXi because it had the right combination of resolution, wide screen display, wide color gamut and yet extremely accurate profiling so I could rely upon what I saw on the display. I use it day in and day out and it's proven trustworthy... As a visual artist, everything depends upon what I see.

R. MAC HOLBERT is the co-founder of Nash Editions. Widely regarded as the world’s first digital printmaking studio focusing solely on photography, Nash Editions has established an international reputation for fine art photographic digital output. Conceived in 1989, and opening its doors in 1991, Nash Editions celebrates its 17^th anniversary this year.

Prior to Nash Editions, Mr. Holbert was the Tour Manager for such music groups as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Peter, Paul & Mary and Carole King. He has long been active in the environmental movement helping to produce benefits for the Cousteau Society, Greenpeace, the Algalita Foundation and others.

In 1989 when we started Nash Editions we would send image data to the IRIS 3047 printer from a reel-to-reel tape reader.  We had no ability to preview the image or to make on screen corrections. All tone and color corrections were controlled by the printer. By 1991 we had acquired an Apple IIfx and a beta version of Photoshop 1.0 and for the first time we were able to preview our images as well as to make corrections. There was no expectation that the screen would accurately represent how the image would translate to paper but it did provide direct control over our output. With a little bit of experience we could make visual corrections to an image.

With the release of Colorsync in 1993 color management slowly became more and more accurate. By 2000 we were working on calibrated CRT's that provided us with a nominally accurate representation of our printed images. Finally in 2003 we acquired 2 Sony Artisan CRT's and we experienced an unmatched level of on-screen accuracy. As the Artisans neared their end of life we realized that replacement displays would not be CRTs.

We had experimented with LCD displays in the past and found that affordable LED displays were generally impossible to accurately calibrate and most suffered from viewing angle restrictions. We looked at several high-end displays but found that they were prohibitively expensive. In 2007 it became apparent that our CRT's were no longer capable of accurate calibration and we were forced to make a change. It was not a change that we were looking forward to. We began a serious investigation into finding a highly accurate yet affordable display.

A friend in San Francisco suggested we check out an NEC LCD. We soon acquired a NEC LCD2690WUXi and began integrating it into our workflow. The first week was spent learning how to properly calibrate the display and adjusting our lighting environment to optimize the display’s accuracy.  Since then we have replaced all our mission critical displays with NECs. We find that they provide us with an unparalleled level of color accuracy and angle of view. Being able to see onscreen nearly all of Adobe RGB(1998) enhances our ability to pre-visualize the final print. It’s now hard to imagine how we ever functioned without such accurate displays!

The Making of American Ruins

In Fall of 2007 Merrell released “American Ruins” a book of evocative infrared photographs of forgotten places. All pre-publication imaging was done using the NEC LCD2690WUXi display. Author and photographer Arthur Drooker remarked, “I have been digitally optimizing my images with Mac’s help for close to 15 years. Never has the process been so smooth and accurate. I no longer worry whether my shadows are plugged up or if my highlights are blown out. The NEC monitor provides an unparalleled accurate representation of the final expression."

JAY MAISEL's name has become synonymous with light, gesture, and color. He started his professional career in 1954. His images have been used for advertising, editorial and corporate communications worldwide. In 1996 he stopped doing most commercial jobs in order to concentrate on teaching and personal work. He has exhibited widely and his prints are in private, corporate and museum collections.

Among his awards are the ASMP Life Time Achievement award, ASMP Photographer of the Year, International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. A graduate of Abraham Lincoln High School, Cooper Union and Yale University, Jay conducts workshops, seminars and lectures around the world. His most recent books are Jay Maisel’s New York and an homage to the World Trade Center, A Tribute.

The 2009 schedule for the New York City Jay Maisel Workshop is available on Jay’s website: http://www.jaymaisel.com

Photography doesn’t have to be as complicated as rocket science, which is great for me because my formal training was in painting. Although I did shoot black and white film early in my career, probably 99% of my work to date has been shot in color. Accurate color has always been a very important aspect of my images and I often ask my workshop students to try and create an image where the subject is purely about color.

They say you can’t teach old dog new tricks, but my more technically inclined friends and colleagues helped me see the light in 2000 - I gave up film after (45) some-odd years and switched to shooting digitally. The change involved growing pains, but as any demanding photographer knows, having the best technology available is always a plus and I have never looked back. An artist’s body of work however, is the sum of their life experiences and my philosophy and approach to shooting remains pretty old school – I spend as much time as I possibly can having fun looking for and shooting anything that might be interesting. Beyond that, I just want the rest of the process between shooting and presenting work to be accurate and simple.

That is what I like about the NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXi monitors we use at my studio. The color is accurate and the design is ergonomic and simple. It’s easy to adjust the display height, or angle, and it’s a real bonus to be able to be able to orient the display vertically. The accurate color of these monitors along with display calibration, and soft proofing is what we use to make limited edition prints. I also like the consistency – when I use more than one monitor with my classes it’s great to know that the color I’m showing is the same no matter which monitor the students are viewing.