Hands on: Effective colour management

Despite operating system support for colour management, and the proliferation of ICC colour profiles for cameras, scanners, monitors and printers, colour management is far from easy.

The fact that what comes off our inkjet printer bears only a passing resemblance to what we see on our monitor is just one of those digital shortcomings we have to live with.

Anyone who has taken a stab at implementing colour management may – after much research, more experimentation and a degree of luck – have achieved some success.

Garbage in, garbage out
One of the obstacles to effective colour management is the failure of generic profiles to reflect the colour characteristics of individual output devices accurately.

In the case of printers, this is usually due to differences in ink and paper combinations from the ones used to create the profile. There is also the question of how to configure settings in the printer driver correctly, so that it doesn’t interfere with the colour management software’s efforts.

For monitors, the situation is similar. Even if you manage to set things up correctly – and the manufacturer’s instructions don’t always make this as straightforward as they could – there’s a chance that your individual display’s characteristics will vary from that of the device used to produce the profile.

Add to that the potential for the display’s characteristics to change with time and environmental effects (ambient lighting, reflections from clothing or brightly coloured walls, etc), and the fact that colour management can be made to work at all becomes more like a matter of faith than computer science.

But it can be made to work – and not just by professionals. The old programming edict ‘garbage in, garbage out’ neatly sums up the source of most colour management problems.

If your profile isn’t right, no amount of tweaking will make a difference. If you are not achieving good results using a generic monitor or printer profile, there’s a fair chance that replacing it with one produced specifically for your device will make all the difference.

The right tools
Hardware profilers for colour displays were once the preserve of design studios and print shops, but now you can pick them up for as little as £60. The hardware consists of a sensor device incorporating a colorimeter, which you attach to the front of the screen.

A software utility runs a series of tests, outputting individual RGB colours and other combinations, which are measured by the hardware sensor. Analysis of the data is then used to compile a profile.

Because the colours are measured directly from your monitor in situ, its individual characteristics are reflected in the profile. It’s the only way you can ensure the profile is accurate.

Before you run the program you need to ensure your monitor is set to the factory defaults, that it’s positioned well – away from bright lights, strong colours, etc – and has had sufficient time to warm up.

The entire process takes about 10 minutes, at the end of which the newly created profile is installed in the C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color folder and set as the default monitor profile.

Although the utility allows you to switch between before and after profile versions of the display, you probably won’t be getting too excited at this stage as there’s no way of telling whether the new custom profile is any more accurate than your previous setup.

You could try printing a test image, but this will probably just highlight the shortcomings of your printer profile more accurately.

You could use Kodak Professional Colour Management Check-up Kit, which consists of a CD with a folder of images that have been scanned using an accurately calibrated and profiled scanner, and printed on an accurately profiled and calibrated printer.

The prints can be compared with your display to assess the accuracy of your display profile. Although printed output can never match a colour display exactly, once you’ve calibrated your monitor, it should provide a fairly close match to the printed images.

If you are using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or another application that supports soft proofing, you can use it to evaluate the accuracy of the monitor profile.