color management

[Milton Tierney]

I am trying to understand how color management interrelates with my printer, photoshop and monitor. Does anyone know of any good color management literature that could help?

[Walter Calahan]

There are tons of books on this subject.

Here's the one I have: http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Col...1888090&sr=1-9

[Joanna Carter]

The basics are:

Your file, whether it comes from a digital camera/back or a scan, contains colour information that should comply with standardised values of red, green and blue.

Because your monitor is mass-produced and, usually, adjustable, in order for you to see the "true" colours, you need to tell the computer to compensate for any differences between the reference colours in the file and the colours your monitor displays.

Calibration software creates a lookup table of differences between the reference colours and those produced by monitors, printers, etc, that the computer can use to ensure that the result you see on screen are as close as possible to the colours you see on the printed paper.

Photoshop also uses this lookup table (called a profile) to emulate the more restricted colour and brightness range of paper on the screen.

There's more to it, but that just about covers the basics.

[Michael Gordon]

Definitely recommend the aforementioned "Real World...", but for straightforward, free, and online, this is hard to beat.

[pherold]

Chromix supplies a color wiki (www.colorwiki.com) which has a glossary, manuals and several years' worth of newsletter articles pertaining to color management. The articles are good because they are designed to be easily readable and relevant to the problems people are actually having out in the field.

For example, a lot of people are simply trying to get their monitor to match their printer, and there's an article that speaks to that:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Printe...atch_my_Screen

But there's also an article on "how to learn more about color management" too!
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Color_Management_Answers

[IanMazursky]

Real world CM is a great book. Once you get over the migraine it turns into a fantastic guide.
Some of the free stuff on the web is great some is misinformation.
A number of the CMYK articles i have read are not accurate or just plain fiction.
Its hard to find the real information in all of the articles.
Not all color management workflows work for everyone. It also depends on the CM hardware/software you have.
If you have a monitor calibrator like the i1 Display you can only calibrate your monitor.
But if you have a spectrophotometer like the i1 series or the ColorMunki, you can do more like profile a printer, calibrate a scanner...

[neil poulsen]

Think of it this way.

Suppose there are three gentlemen, a Frenchman, a German, and a Spaniard, and the first has a French/English pocket dictionary, the second has a German/English pocket dictionary, and the fourth has a Spanish/English pocket dictionary. Each can speak only their own language.

So, if one is going to speak with another, he must first translate to English, whereupon the person to which he is speaking must translate the English back to his native language.

This is how color management works. The printer speaks in it's own language, and it's pocket dictionary is the printer profile. The monitor speaks in it's own language, and it's pocket dictionary is the monitor profile. And, Photoshop speaks in the language of the workspace (e.g. Adobe RGB, or sRGB, or ProPhoto, etc.), and it's pocket dictionary (for that image) is the workspace profile. The common language "English" is LAB.

So, when Photoshop sends an image to the printer, it first translates (converts) the image to LAB, whereupon the printer's dictionary (printer profile) is used to translate (convert) the image back into the printer's language. At this point, the printer understands what's being said and prints the image. (Actually, it's Photoshop that back-translates the image from LAB into the Printer's language, and the user picks the correct profile from a list where it says "Printer Profile.") Correspondingly, the same double translation occurs as the image is updated on the monitor. Etc.

Embedding the workspace profile with the image file is much the same as one of the gentlemen above putting their pocket dictionary in their pocket. It's available when they need it. In this way, when a new image comes into Photoshop, Photoshop grabs the pocket dictionary from the image's "pocket".

Of course, there's more to it, but this is kind of a basic explanation. For example, each profile (or color dictionary) has four "dialects." Any one of these can be selected as a particular rendering intent. Except in special circumstances, I tend to always use relative colorimetric rendering intent. That's also the default for monitor profiles.

[pherold]

This is a great illustration Neil! Did you just now come up with that or is it taken from something else you've written? I'd like to send clients to this so they can get a better feel for how it all works. It reminds me of The Color of Toast .

[bdkphoto]

Here's a link to a great new reference for digital best practices, including color management workflow.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/color/colo...ement-overview

[venchka]

Throw in a custom made printer profile matched to each paper that you use. Sometimes the folks who make the paper provide decent profiles to match their paper your printer. Sometimes not and then you have to buy a custom paper profile.