Color
Management in a Nutshell
Background
In my Over the
Gamut and Through the Woods column
from August 2004, I made an attempt to explain how to use
color management and ICC profiles. In this article, we
take a step back in order to discover whether or not we
really need color management and we'll discuss some
alternatives. As you can see by the August 2004 article,
moving into a color managed workflow requires the use of
ICC profiles which you may not be familiar with initially.
In addition, acquiring these profiles is not always free
and may require at least some minor investment.
Ultimately, your investment of some time and money can
pay off in the form of more accurate color on screen and
in print, but is it worth it?
The naked eye
Assessing color by eye is a simple
process that involves some very complex issues. We may
look at a printed photo and discover that it looks very
dull with washed out colors. This is a simple assessment
but it can be caused by a multitude of problems. Simply
cranking up the saturation on the image and reprinting
may solve the problem to your satisfaction, or it may
create other problems like loss of detail in bright
colors like blue sky. You might even look at a printed
photo in your office under fluorescent lights and notice
that a blue flower looks too purple, only to take the
same print to a window and the flower appears the proper
shade of blue under outdoor lighting.
Assessing our needs
Rather than try to understand all
these interactions, why they happen, and the possible
fixes, let's ask ourselves some simple questions to help
us determine whether or not we really need to step into
the world of color management and ICC profiles.
Are you happy with color
in your photos? This is ultimately the driving
force behind color management for most people. If
you take photos with your camera, print them,
give them to friends and family, and everyone
thinks they look great, you probably don't need
color management. The only problem here is that
many people who used to think their prints looked
perfect say they didn't know what they were
missing after they tried a true color managed
workflow. It is very difficult to "imagine"
how your photos could look better on screen or in
print without seeing the difference. If you
strive to get the best reproduction of your
photos and you are open to the possibility that
they can be improved, read on.
Do your photos look very
close to the same (color-wise) on screen compared
to your prints? A common problem with non color
managed workflows is that there are often
differences in color when you compare a print to
what gets displayed on your monitor. Everything
might look reasonable until you run across that
one purple sweater that just doesn't look right
in print but looks fine on screen, or the orange
beach ball that looks fine in print but looks too
yellow on screen. If you are generally happy with
the way your photos appear on screen and in print
but you find a few of these scattered nagging
issues, color management and the use of ICC
profiles is the most straightforward way of
correcting "oddball" problems with
color. Trying to correct them using other (manual)
image editing methods often corrects the problem
at hand, but creates a new one somewhere else.
If you've decided to try a
color managed workflow, are you willing to make
the investment in time/money? It takes some time
to learn how to use ICC profiles, learn where to
activate them in your software, and learn how to
use different options that relate to the use of
ICC profiles. My Over
the Gamut and Through the Woods
column from August 2004 goes a long way toward
that understanding. It may take a few hours of
reading and using your ICC aware software to get
up to speed, but we're normally not talking weeks/months
of experience or anything really overly
complicated once you understand the basics. As
far as monetary investment, see below for a
breakdown.
The color management
investment
Time and money are the major costs
of a color management workflow. It will take a little
reading to understand how to use ICC profiles in a color
managed workflow and may actually complicate your
workflow a bit if, for example, you change from one type
of photo paper to another and now find that you need to
acquire a new ICC profile for the new paper. In a non
color managed workflow, you would just print on the new
paper and experiment a bit. If you see something you don't
like, you can change some print driver options or tweak
the image and reprint. In a color managed workflow, use
of the new paper is less of a manual effort and more of a
scientific measurement process. While it may take some
extra time up front to print test targets and create an
ICC profile for the new paper, it does at least guarantee
some level of color accuracy and in the long run may save
a lot of time by eliminating reprints, manual tweaks, and
fiddling with image edits.
So let's say you'd like to give it
a try, but what about the monetary investment? If you use
your monitor as a "draft" view, are mainly
concerned about color accuracy in prints, and don't do a
lot of image editing with respect to color, you might be
able to get by with just profiling your printer to create
an ICC profile for the printer. A low cost printer
profiling tool such as my own Profile
Prism is a good investment for getting
color accurate prints by allowing the profiling of any
printer/ink/paper combination. Such a tool will cost
about $79. But what if you don't have a scanner? A good
flatbed scanner is required to be able to profile a
printer because a scanner is used to "read" the
printed target along with a reference target to make the
adjustments in the profile. If you have an old scanner or
your current scanning software is inadequate, the scanner
may not be good enough to create accurate printer
profiles. If that's the case, add about $100 to $120 for
a good scanner like the Canon LiDE 80 that is capable of
creating excellent printer profiles when combined with
scanner based printer profiling software.
Starting from scratch, we can now
create our own printer profiles for any inket or dye sub
printer, paper, and ink combination for a monetary
investment of about $200. Considering the price of ink,
photo paper, and time, that's not bad, but what about the
monitor? If you do decide to do some edits and work on
color in your images, your monitor may also need a
profile because the edits you do on screen might not look
the same when you print. Although your printer is
printing accurate color via a printer ICC profile, your
monitor may have some issues with accuracy. You can do a
visual "calibration" of your monitor using a
monitor calibration tool like Adobe Gamma or the monitor
calibration tool that comes with Profile
Prism, but realize that this is not as
accurate as profiling. To create a truly accurate profile
for your monitor and "close the loop" on color
management, you will need to buy a colorimeter that
attaches to your monitor. The colorimeter takes actual
readings and creates an accurate profile. You can get a
good monitor colorimeter with software for $250 to $300
at places like ColorVision or Monaco Systems.
When we add these up, we're at $500
to take total control of color. The input device (camera)
needs a profile too, but it is beyond the scope of what
most people will be able to do to create camera profiles.
The better/professional cameras usually come with a
"color space" setting which is the same thing
as a profile. For example, set your camera to sRGB color
space, and all images from the camera will be in the sRGB
color space profile. Set it to Adobe RGB, and all images
will use the Adobe RGB profile. If not specified or
selectable in your camera, sRGB is the only real choice.
Just remember that a full color managed workflow requires
an accurate ICC profile for both the input device (camera/scanner)
and the output device (monitor/printer). If you are
missing an ICC profile on either side of the input/output
equation, accuracy may be questionable.
Go or no?
Ultimately your decision on
whether or not to adopt a color managed workflow will
depend on your wants and needs. If you are a professional
or a semi-pro who occasionally sells prints or does work
for publications, you will probably want to use color
management because the benefits will show in your work
and your time/money invested will come back to you. Color
management via ICC profiles is currently the only method
of dealing with color that can actually ensure some level
of scientific accuracy in the results. If you are a
"casual shooter" who prints a few photos from
time to time and you don't consider digital photography a
hobby, you may be hard pressed to justify the time and
money investment required in a color managed workflow.
This certainly doesn't mean you
need to be a pro to justify color management. You might
simply be someone who takes pride in their photography
and you want that to show in your photos. Different
combinations of equipment (cameras, scanners, monitors,
and printers) work better together and you might be using
a combo that produces very adequate results without
fooling with color management. On the other hand, you may
be someone who has been plagued with inaccuracy in
certain colors in your prints and you want a better way
to solve the problem than the endless moving of sliders
in your image editor. Some problems are very difficult to
solve by manual tweaking but are easily solved using
color management. Here is just one
example of how different equipment can
render different results and how color management can
bring them together in a scientific, measurable way with
no (or very little) manual tweaking.
Mike Chaney
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