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Color Management: What You See Is What You Get
The Significance of Color Management for Photographers
Undoubtedly, the proliferation of digital imaging is thrilling news for shutterbugs. But it magnifies a point of concern – the consistency of color. Professional/amateur photographers and beginners often find that the image color is hardly unified through the workflow from viewing, editing to output. In particular, the color of the same image may appear differently on different screens. To make unified image color possible is the fundamental requirement of users and the ultimate aim of color management. This column, courtesy of Datacolor, is a series that examines common problems that users often find in their digital workflow.
Critical Monitor Color Accuracy
When your old computer monitor breaks down and you buy a new monitor, did you notice that colors as displayed on your new monitor appeared different from the old one? Perhaps you would convince yourself that it was just because your eyes were not yet accustomed to the new monitor, or simply because of the surrounding light. Then you would try to adjust the settings of your new monitor (i.e. brightness, contrast and color temperature) to that of your old monitor, as far as your memory allows.
However, have you ever stopped to think whether your old monitor had actually been displaying accurate colors all these while? Could it be that all along you have been using a monitor that displays inaccurate colors and what you have been seeing on that monitor were images or photos with the wrong colors?
What do you do then? If you have no idea about how to achieve accurate color management, monitor calibration is a crucial link that you should start with.
- Deficiency of Human Eyes to Distinguish Colors
Human eyes are unable to adjust adjacent colors. If you capture one object with a digital camera and view the resulting image on a computer monitor, you may find that the colors of the photo are not identical to those of the real object. Why?
One possible cause could be the inaccurate white balance setting of your camera. So you reset the white balance and take another shot, and disappointedly, the colors viewed on monitor are still different. Then you start to doubt about the color accuracy of your monitor and using the naked eye, you try to tweak the monitor’s settings by comparing the image displayed with the real object. Problem solved? Not quite, really.
Our human eyes are not the best tools to use when it comes to discerning colors, because they are not able to distinguish minute differences between colors. Take a green plant, for instance. How will our eyes be able to determine its shade of green to ensure that the color as it appears in the image on the monitor will be true to the actual color? Besides, what we see through our naked eyes on any given day has a lot to do with the surrounding lights, not to mention what tiredness and strain can do to affect your vision.
- Various Colors across Monitors
When you pass by an electronics store where various monitor displays are placed side by side, have you ever noticed that every one of them has a different hue, brightness and contrast? It’s not difficult for you to figure out the reason – difference in monitor settings. At one glance, we can probably tell which display is “warmer”, which is “cooler” but for the all-important question as to which display shows the most accurate colors, there’s no way to be sure simply with our naked eyes. The only way to achieve color fidelity across different monitors is to rely on professional monitor calibrators.
- Calibrating Monitor Colors with Special Instruments
To make your monitor display colors accurately, you must use instruments specifically designed for this purpose and for stable and reliable results, it is not enough to rely on calibration software alone. With software alone, chances are you will still need your eyes to “assist” in the calibration process and we already know that you can’t trust your eyes a hundred percent.
It takes a combination of the calibration software and hardware to obtain the best possible color performance of your monitor; proper instruments with proprietary software have to be employed to reset RGB values, color temperature, contrast and so on.
Using Reliable Monitors to Edit Images
Many photographers who want superior image quality tend to prefer editing their images on their own monitors, as it gives them more control over how their images will finally turn out. They believe that, as far as colors are concerned, the final image output will be like what they see on their screens. This is only true when you have a calibrated monitor; an uncalibrated one is like an unmeasured rule and using such a monitor for your digital imaging is a risk you do not want to, and should not, take.
Whenever you edit your images digitally on your computer using image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop, you rely on what your monitor shows you to determine the adjustments that you make, such as whether to adjust the brightness, contrast etc. of the image. Can you imagine the horror when you realize that your main source of reliance (i.e. the monitor) is not that reliable after all?
For example, your images as viewed on your monitor may appear yellowish and so you spend a significant amount of time correcting it and yet when they come out in print, the images turned out bluish instead. Before you start to feel helpless about the situation, do know that calibrating your monitor with professional tools such as the Datacolor Spyder3Elite can work wonders in ensuring that you see the colors of your images as accurately as possible on your screen.
Take Action Now!
Even if you have the best camera to capture your subjects and the best computer with the best monitor for your post-production work, without proper integration and calibration, the results will not be desirable. Therefore, a carefully calibrated monitor is critical to accurate colors and if you are serious about your photography, it’s time to take action and calibrate your monitor now!
This column is brought to you by:
About Datacolor
Datacolor technology provides affordable, easy-to-use digital color control products to creative professionals, photographers, corporate customers and consumers around the world. Because color matters, leading businesses, creative professionals and consumers worldwide choose Datacolor’s innovative technology solutions to consistently achieve the right color.
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