Photo Credit: Michel Tcherevkoff

Photographers used to spend countless hours testing film stocks to determine their color characteristics and painstakingly match darkroom prints to color samples. Today many digital shooters don’t fully grasp the steps necessary to ensure their digital photos are color-managed. A color-managed digital workflow can sometimes be confusing to beginners, but these steps will show you how shockingly simple it is to create a color-accurate system.

Monitor Calibration

Each monitor displays color differently, making it difficult to tell if the colors you see on your screen match those on any other screen. The answer? Calibration, which means comparing the colors your monitor can produce with the colors captured in your pictures.
    Calibrating your monitor can be done with an affordable color-management tool called a colorimeter. Available from several companies, colorimeters come with a small, standalone device that’s placed in front of the monitor, and software that reads, evaluates and displays a range of colors. By running the software, your computer can subtly tweak color, so the resulting colors are true to life. For example, every color has a corresponding number value. If a photograph of a stop sign displays a red value of 198 on your monitor when it was 200 in the photo, with proper monitor calibration, your computer will know to increase the amount of red to 202, in order to have a resulting value of 200 when viewed. The beauty is that once you’ve calibrated your monitor, you don’t have anything left to do. Your photos come out of your camera and onto your screen looking the same way they did when you captured them.

Producing Profiles

Once your color calibration is set, you’ll need a record to remember it. A profile is akin to a recipe sheet for how to create accurate colors under different circumstances. By creating a profile for your monitor, it’s possible to adjust computer colors to match those in the real world. Many monitor and printer companies create their own premade profiles (often referred to as canned profiles) that represent the color abilities of the given monitor under factory-specification. Because different models of the same monitor can vary and monitors’ colors change over time, a custom profile is more effective. Each time you recalibrate your device, you create a new profile. This allows you to compensate for changes in color over time and to make different profiles for different lighting conditions.

Printer Profile

Even a properly calibrated and profiled monitor differs depending on lighting conditions, so it’s also important to profile your printer. Printer profiling sometimes requires expensive hardware and can be a laborious task. The first step in profiling a printer is to print a page with a number of small color swatches on it (that’s the easy part). The second step involves placing a colorimeter on each color square and pressing the appropriate button to record the color value (there are some automated systems, but they’re pricey).
    Another challenge is that each type of paper has a different surface and coating, affecting the way ink is absorbed into the page and requiring different profiles. Many photographers therefore stick with canned printer profiles made by the manufacturer. Paper manufacturers usually put the most common printer profiles on their Web sites, providing a better degree of color accuracy than printing without any calibration.
    Remember, even the best-maintained color management system will have some weaknesses. But with experience, it becomes easy to tell which colors won’t reproduce well, and with a properly calibrated system, you can ensure your colors pop off the page.