color management for photography

I was speaking to my workshop class yesterday about photography color management. The single most important step to managing color is calibrating your monitor. I use a Datacolor Spyder4Pro for under $200 it can't be beat,  but there are lots of options.

Stephen Alvarez

St Andrew's TN 

Comments

[Charles in charge]

I used to calibrate my monitor, too, but haven't for years. I use Apple's built-in whatever-it-is to set the color space. My contention is that 99% of my clients have NO idea about calibration, they sit with their backs to giant windows or work under all kinds of mixed light, and with all sorts of monitors, imacs with and without glossy displays... unless its a totally closed loop, you're kind of beating your head against the wall with this stuff. if it looks good on your monitor it will probably look good on their iphone or ipad or imac or i-don't-know... if it's being printed for a magazine or brochure, the printer will tweak it. if it's for the web, no matter what it looks like in your shop it's going to look different to the viewer in their office or home or library or coffeeshop.

if you do a lot of printing yourself or send work out to a place for prints, then you might want to pay more attention than i do. but i find that even without that, you make a test print, or send out a print, find out it's lighter or darker or more magenta on the display, and adjust accordingly... even if you DO calibrate, then do you have a RIP for your printer which costs as much as the printer, or do you use photoshop to take care of colors (perceptual color? ectometric ;-), whatever) ... i don't know, Stephen, it's pretty complicated. it's an endless rabbit hole.