Kwik 'n' Dirty Color Management

Thanks to Chief on DPReview for pointing me towards the final pieces that got everything to fall into place.

Color management isn't something the amateur or even professional photographer has had to worry about -- or even the darkroom wizard. It was the province of the graphic designer, art director, and printer -- the guy who took the rap if the skin tones came out green even though they looked fine on the slide. However, with digital cameras in every pocket, Photoshop in every computer, and high-quality inkjet printers on every desk, it easily becomes a real issue. More so if you take the leap to RAW processing. However, like most things, it's not rocket science either -- once you understand what's going on and what can go wrong, it becomes fairly... manageable.

Color management is a bit daunting, and very frustrating if you don't know what's going on -- and there's a lot of nonsense about colorspaces, profiles, Adobe RGB, and sRGB floating around discussion boards. However, the basic concepts are actually pretty simple, and nowadays both Windows computers and, of course, Macintoshes are well equipped to deal with it. Unfortunately not yet Linux systems, though, but now that digital cameras have gotten nerds interested in image processing, I have high hopes that we won't have to wait long.

In this essay, we'll take a quick and dirty approach to understanding color management and knocking together a system that gets the job done reasonably well. It'll be the poor and lazy man's approach, and won't get you the hi-fidelity results you can achieve using professional monitors, IT8 targets, colorimeters, spyders, and other widgets like that -- but it'll be good enough to get the job done, most of the time.

There are a few basic concepts we need to get our head around before going to the nitty-gritty of color managing your system. These are color gamut, color space, working space, and profile. Once we understand what they mean and how they relate to each other, we'll look at what your computer does with them. Then we'll get to the specifics: a step-by-step guide for color managing your own computer -- including profiling your monitor without special hardware like spyders or colorimeters (although these will certainly make things easier). Finally, we'll look at a simple way to test your color managed workflow, and finish up by shooting some trouble. But there's one thing we need to address before all this.