color

Color Management

The Rocket Science of Digital Photography

Every industry has a topic that is fraught with controversy because complexities are required to get results. Introduce those complexities to a range of final mediums that include magazine pages in the U.S. and Worldwide, the internet with an infinite number of monitors under different operating systems, from matchbooks and stamps to TV screens and billboards.

Lets not forget that photography is largely subjective, for example there is often a big difference between good color and accurate color.

Mathematics is the heart of color management, that and the International Color Consortium. ICC profiling takes a known color and creates a number for it so that a computer knows what color you are talking about. When you calibrate your monitor you are reading the colors your monitor is displaying and comparing that to what your computer thinks it is displaying and adjusting accordingly. Simple, right?

Wrong. How many times have you seen a print that can reproduce the color that comes from a neon or fluorescent light? You haven’t ever seen a ‘perfect 2D reproduction’, because ink and paper simply cannot replicate that range of color produced by neon. That color range is out of gamut for most printers. ICC profiles map those colors to the closest matching produceable colors for the output device you are sending the image to.

I’ve been dealing with color for a long time. I’ve created custom profiles for drum scanners, digital cameras, and printers. I thoroughly understand the pre-press process from beginning to end and can adapt to your work-flow whether CMYK conversions occur at the last step in the process or moving from RGB is the first step after capture.