Color Management

When you start editing and printing photographs, it doesn’t take too long to run into issues and problems with matching color all the way along the workflow. You spend hours carefully tweaking the colors on an image until it is perfect, only to find out that the printed copy is horrible. Where do you even look to fix the problem? Well, I went back to school again this past weekend – to the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO) – to try and figure out how cameras, computers, monitors, and printers deal with color.

While color itself is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, it turns out that it can be reasonably easy to manage. While there are lots of tips, tricks, and important settings to deal with, the single most important piece of the puzzle is the color that your monitor reproduces. If you can solve this problem, most of the rest is easy. While there are some people that can calibrate a monitor by eye (sort of like tuning a guitar by ear), most people will rely on monitor calibration tools. These devices (such as a Datacolor Spyder) attach to your monitor and read the colors that your monitor reproduces. It can then create a unique and specific profile for your monitor, which your operating system will use to modify the colors it reproduces. So when you look at an image of a red apple, it will be red. If you are already lucky enough to have a printer that you can depend on, then most of your color printing problems will be solved.

To finely tune monitor colors for critical work – corporate logo colors, for instance – you need to be concerned about the light in the room you are working in. Some people will need to calibrate monitors with the drapes closed, under a consistent work lighting environment.  And to ensure the printer is doing the best it can, you will need to have printer profiles for the specific paper you are using, as well as up-to-date drivers for the printer of course. But, if you do nothing else, get your monitor calibrated.

So we worked for two fairly intense days, experimenting with settings in Photoshop and testing the printing workflow. It was a good opportunity to work on some of my better photos and to get good prints of them. It all went very well, and I learned a lot. Ask me anything…

The only downside is that I now have a monitor calibrator and a new printer on my wish list