COLOR MANAGEMENT

Color Management

Every device in the digital photography workflow – camera, scanner, monitor, printer – produces color differently. Therefore it is important to recognize this fact, and be prepared to compensate for it when doing post-processing of your digital images. Color management is the calibration process that enables them all to act in harmony, so there is no discrepancy in any display, and reproducing the colors is accurate each and every time you bring up a given image. The inability to effectively color manage an image will cause considerable frustration and headaches for someone making prints from the digital photographs. Color management allows you more flexibility and consistency when matching the color between a monitor and your printer; the various types of photographic paper (fine art, glossy, matte, etc.) with various types of inks. To avoid discrepancies at any stage, mastering color management is a must. The learning curve and knowledge base is relatively high, however, the results are more than rewarding and the digital darkroom becomes all the more expansive.

A digital image that passes through a system that is color managed properly will retain its true colors. Without color management, an image that is interpreted poorly by the computer and screen will print inaccurately. An image that is color managed retains the true colors captured at the moment of shooting.

Monitor Calibration

The first device that you need to calibrate is the monitor, since it gets the most “viewing use” of any other step (outside of the final print, but it’s too late at that point) and should therefore be your reference or baseline. To calibrate your monitor enter the “Settings” menu for your monitor and set the primary (RGB) colors to what is optimal for you, then set the white point/color temperature to 6500k, D65, or sRGB. Be sure to then set the monitor’s color depth to 24-bit or (even better) 32-bit (for greater degrees of shading). Next, adjust the contrast and gamma to what looks “perfect” to you. Then save the calibration (most monitors enable you to do this). Many monitors come with a variety of calibration presets, and you can use these, as it might make it much easier to calibrate everything else down the line. For example, if you selected Adobe 1998 RGB, then you’ll want to select Adobe 1998 RGB on each device in the workflow (scanner, printer, adjustments to the paper).

Monitor Profiling

The professional and therefore proper way to calibrate your monitor is to use profiling software and a device called a colorimeter – a small device (or spider) that fits on to the monitor that works in conjunction with the software to set the monitor’s calibration and profile. The colorimeter plugs into your computer, lays flat on the screen and shows you what the color standard is and what your monitor is displaying, so that adjustments can be pinpoint accurate. The software package also lets your adjust the white luminance (brightness level of the white), the white point (the color of the white in degrees Kelvin), black luminance (brightness level of the black), tonal response and gray balance. Once you’ve made the adjustments, tweaks and subtle nudges, a savable and usable ICC profile is generated. This ICC profile ensures that the printer, with that specific ink and paper of your choosing, accurately reproduces the monitor’s color.

It is VERY IMPORTANT to note that if you attempt to make prints without color managing, you’ll be sorely disappointed and you’ll never have a print that matches the colors on the screen. A high-quality profiling package costs about $200- $300, and is well worth the investment… if you take your photography seriously. One other difficulty is that your monitor will lose its calibration properties over time, so you must remember to check and recalibrate the monitor every three to six months.

Printer Calibration

The printer is the next device in the digital photography workflow that you’ll want to calibrate. And it’s fairly easy to do in comparison to the monitor. Your printer has driver software that contains pre-programmed settings that will match the paper you’re using and other color management profiles. Remember when we mentioned that you could use an ICC profile? Well, an ICC Color Space Profile is an international color standard that aligns the printer with the color space and is tweaked to the various types of media that you use. You maybe familiar with some of these - Lab, Adobe 1998 RGB, sRGB, etc., and by employing the ICC profile you’ll cut down on wasted ink and paper trying to “find” the right adjustments on the adjustment sliders. However, always perform a test print to make sure you’re getting exactly what you want. If not, you will want to make further adjustments to the color to get it to your specific liking.

Printer Profiling

Now that you’ve calibrated and profiled your monitor, and calibrated your printer, it’s time to profile the printer so you can consistently produce accurate outputs time and time again. If needed, you can profile two or more different printers – all to the same reference standard. To profile your printer, much like the monitor, you need a profiling program and spectrophotometer, a specialized tool that analyzes the colors for consistency in how the ink is creating the color and how the ink is applied to the paper. This is also part of the calibration process, ensuring that the ink is evenly distributed on the media of choice.

ICC Profile

ICC stands for International Color Consortium, and this organization has developed a vast series of databases for specific color space profiles. A color profile is a dataset that describes all the specific color attributes for an input (camera, scanner) or output (monitor or printer or paper) device in the digital photography workflow. The color profile enables you to match the calibration on all the devices in the chain, so they can interpret or read color the exact same way. For example, this guarantees that the crystal clear blue waters of the Caribbean off Bermuda look the same on the camera’s LCD display, your MacBook Pro’s LCD screen and on the Kodak Super Glossy paper printed from your Epson inkjet printer.

Soft Proofing

The underlying reason for color managing (calibrating and profiling) all of your equipment is so that you can create startlingly clear, sharp and color-accurate digital prints – prints that exactly match the color and vibrancy from your monitor (where you’ve finalized your “digital negative”). Soft Proofing is the process of using the monitor to check what the final, output print will look like on paper – a specific paper of your choosing. This paper can be anything from regular copy paper to high-end fine art photo paper. Part of setting up the printer profile is “setting the white” of the photo paper that you intend on using. White is a very subjective color and each different type of photo paper is actually a different color of white. The other part is determining how the ink that you’re using is going to react with the photo paper that you’ve chosen. This is important, so you, as the photographer, can see exactly how the final print will look once it’s on photo paper … just prior to you clicking “print.”

Conclusion

Understanding and employing Color Management is the method required to ensure that you can deliver bold, expressive and subtle photo prints catered to your (or your client’s) specifications and expectations. There are no other repeatable methodologies to ensure that each and every print is color accurate and beautiful each and every time you make an output. Color Management is the method and the means.