Color Management for the Serious Photographer

Accurate color reproduction is the bane of the serious photographer. In the end what we want is to see on our screen or on a final print the same scene we captured with the camera. It is a lot to ask.

This discussion pushes aside the physiological and psychological aspects of color perception that make this already a difficult problem. Suffice it to say that how you perceive colors changes from one day to the next (even from one hour to the next) based on a lot of variables that are difficult to control. We are going to ignore that and focus only on those aspects of color management that are measured by non-human mechanical means.

There are already a few books on this topic covering issues in great detail - even a "Dummies" book - so I am only going to write about my personal experience with the aim that I may inspire you to achieve the same result or at least let you know that it is not as complicated or expensive as it once used to be.

Monitor Calibration
With the exception of the LCD screen on the back of your camera the computer monitor is the first place where you see the image you captured in fine enough detail to matter. Furthermore you will do any image editing while viewing results on the monitor. It is crucial that this one piece of equipment be accurately calibrated.

Calibrating the monitor is a lot easier and among the cheapest aspects of color management these days thanks to low-cost colorimeters now available on the market. The idea is to turn on the monitor long enough for it to reach a steady-state operating condition. For older monitors this means you let it get warm enough that you do not have to worry about CRT drift from a cold start-up. For LCD - I really do not know what this means. I typically turn on my monitor and have it on a half hour or so before I calibrate it. There should be little to no ambient light in the room as that could throw off the measuring device. The colorimeter and its associated software will then run through an assortment of color patterns on your monitor of known color values and then compare what it reads off the screen. The final result is a color ICC profile that you store on your computer and, using your operating systems display preferences, you set it to that profile. Most software for doing this offers you a before & after view of things so you can see the improvement from the calibration.

That is the first step. Having done this you can rest assured knowing that images you create and post on the web will look nearly the same on any other monitor out there that has also been properly calibrated. Sadly, that number is very small. But you are already doing better than most. More importantly if you want to print your photo or send it off to a pro lab for other output, you definitely want to start with a calibrated image source.

Printer Calibration
This heading is slightly incorrect. We are not actually calibrating a printer but rather creating a profile that tells the printer how to print your image using a specific ink and paper combination.

I would guess that most people are using the inks designed for their printer and that come from the printer manufacturer. Most will even use paper from the same manufacturer. Therefore, simply downloading ICC printer profiles from the manufacturers website will suffice here. Even if you use alternative papers you typically can download ICC profiles for your printer/ink combo from the paper vendor's site.

However, using a paper manufacturer's or printer manufacturer's ICC profiles can often lead to incorrect color reproduction. Epson was notorious a few years back for having inconsistent color reproduction from one printer to the next - within the same printer model line! Downloading their ICC profiles was thus a hit-or-miss affair. Paper manufacturer's ICC profiles suffer similar issues. Some offer ICC profiles meant to fit all of a printer manufacturer's line or towards a specific printer manufacturer's ink set.

My case is further complicated in that I use a set of inks from a third-party. The formulation is different enough that I required custom ICC profiles to be made. Having custom profiles is something I therefore recommend for anyone who is putting serious effort into creating prints.

Having a custom profile made is a two stage process. In the first stage you print out a color chart (obtained from the party creating the profile) with all color management turned off. This means turning off color management from within Photoshop (or whatever image editor you use) as well as in the printer driver for your system. How to achieve this depends greatly on what software you are using and what operating system you are in. The idea is that the color chart consists of numerous color patches of known values. It is important that they be printed as-is with no built-in "enhancement". The color chart needs to be printed using the inks that you want profiled on the paper for which you need the ICC profile. Thus you may have to make more than one print if you want ICC profiles for more than one type of paper.

The second stage involves sending these color chart prints to the party that will be making your ICC profiles. A device similar to the monitor colorimeters will read each of the color spots and compare its readings with the known values. The differences between the two are used to create the printer ICC profile. You save these profiles on your computer and select them when it comes time to print your image.

As with monitor colorimeters there are now a few sub $200 printer profile devices on the market. Having read a few reviews of those compared with profiles made with higher-end equipment I chose to avoid the cheap stuff. Unfortunately, I didn't want to spend $2000 for the industry standard type of equipment. In the end I used Mesa Photo Arts in Santa Fe to have my ICC profiles made. There are probably production houses near you that provide the same service and there are numerous online entities doing so as well. In my case, Mesa has two options. For $25 they will produce a single ICC profile made from a ~800 patch color chart. This is below price on some of the places I had checked out previously online. 800+ patches is fairly standard. I opted for their second offering - a $40 ICC profile made from a 1768 patch color chart that prints on two 8.5″ × 11″ pages. I had two ICC profiles made for the two papers I use in my production work (Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl and Harmon Gloss FB Al if you want to know).

After all this I finally have a system where what I see on my monitor ends up being what I see in my prints without the need to cycle through a "print, adjust curves/brightness/colors, reprint, repeat" situation.

Reference
The Digital Color Printing Handbook: A Photographer's Guide to Creative Color Management and Printing Techniques by Tim Daly. This is the book I started with and have found quite useful and indispensable. It contains perhaps more information than necessary and is more geared towards people in the professional graphic arts field where color reproduction will make or break an art house.

Color Management in Digital Photography: Ten Easy Steps to True Colors in Photoshop by Brad Hinkel. This is a book I would have purchased had it been out back in 2003 when I got into this mess. It is a concise and simplied set of steps to achieve a good color managed workflow. It is Photoshop-specific but really would apply to any image editing software that subscribes to the ICC system of doing things (i.e. just about all commercial apps).

The colorimeter I use to calibrate my monitor is the ColorVision (now DataColor) Spyder 2 Pro. It works on both LCD and CRT monitors and has been very reliable. Even my LCD monitor (24" iMac) needs to be calibrated once per month making this a very wise investment. The Spyder 3 is the latest version of this product.