Color management, though technical, is not rocket science; there are a few strategies that can help facilitate understanding its intricacies and make the process of color calibration much less painful. For the most part, it’s not that difficult to create or select a profile that matches the output of your printer to the rich colors that you see on your screen. Photoshop CS5, as well as other software in the Adobe Creative Suite, provides integrated color management features that can help close the gap between light and ink. Today, managing your color—though not exactly simple—is easier to do than ever. 

 

COLOR SETTINGS

The Color Settings dialog box selected from the Photoshop, Illustrator or the InDesign Edit menu is a good place to begin a basic understanding of color calibration. Color Settings are synchronized throughout the Adobe Creative Suite so setting up a color environment in one of the programs establishes a consistent color space for all of the software. 

 

This dialog box looks formidable and indeed, there are many controls in the interface—but fortunately the interactive Description field at the bottom of the dialog box offers general explanations of each of the features. Simply move the curser over the feature to display the description. 

 

But hold on. Before we tour the dialog box we should answer the important question, What exactly is color management? Paradoxically, the answer lies within another question: How is the image going to be output? Color management is about manipulating the numerical color values of an image to conform to the color potential of a specific output device, weather it be a monitor or a printer. An ICC (International Color Consortium) profile defines an image’s “color space” so that it can be configured on screen to match how it will look when printed. 

 

Getting the color in your printed image to match the monitor’s display colors may at first seem like a daunting task, but by systematically following a few basic steps, this goal can be easily achieved.

 

MONITOR YOUR MONITOR

The first step is to calibrate your monitor so that the on-screen image is optimized to look its best. The quick and cheap option is to use a software calibration utility. If you’re using Windows you’ll have to obtain and install one. A free calibration utility for Windows that you can download online is Monitor Calibration Wizard available at: www.hex2bit.com/products/product_mcw.asp. 

 

Figure 1: The initial screen of the Mac’s Display Calibration utility.

On the Mac use the Calibrate utility that can be found by clicking System Preferences > Displays > Color (see Figure 1). Both of these software programs are fine for a quick fix, but they use your observations to determine color accuracy which, of course, can be quite subjective. 

 

A better solution is to use a tri-stimulus colorimeter that can measure the temperature of the light displayed on screen. The colorimeter is a color measuring device that attaches to the screen with suction cups for CRT monitors or a counter weight for LCD displays. It measures the color temperature, gamma, and white point of the display. The device is usually bundled with software that analyzes the color and generates an ICC profile—such as the i1 Display 2 software package from X-Rite, which is a fairly more robust monitor profiling package but also offers a basic setup option. 

 

Figure 2: Gamma, Luminance and White Point settings in the calibration software.

There are several instruments on the market these days that can help you calibrate your monitor to ensure the consistency of the color you see on screen during editing sessions. I use a Greytag Macbeth Eye One colorimeter-spectrophotometer bundled with Eye One Match software. In the initial calibration screen for a print workflow, I set the Gamma to 2.2, the Luminance to 90 and the White Point to 5500 Kelvin (Figure 2.)

 

There is an excellent video tutorial online at http://tinyurl.com/3yrqsn5. It walks you through the calibration process with the Eye One on a monitor that has contrast, brightness and RGB controls. If you have a monitor with specific controls it’s worth the extra time to adjust them to the recommended settings. If not, the software will direct you to the automated calibration process.

 

The calibration software sequentially generates screen images of several tonally different red, green, blue, gray, black and white color swatches that the colorimeter analyzes, and feeds back to the software. The software then writes the profile for the monitor and saves it to the appropriate folder.

 

SCREEN-TO-PRINT MATCHING

Matching a print to a monitor is a more involved process, but it definitely doable. The Eye One Match software has very clear step-by-step instructions built into the software. In this process you start by printing a color chart on the target printer and on the substrate that you are profiling. 

 

Figure 3: The Eye One iO scanning table from X-Rite.

The color chart consists of multiple swatches of color. You can scan the chart manually, line by line using a hand-held spectrophotometer, which takes some practice; or for around $2,000, you can purchase an Eye One iO Scanning Table, which will speed up the process considerably (see Figure 3). 

 

Attach the spectrophotometer to the scanning table to automatically scan the swatches. When scanned, the software writes a profile and places it into your Color folder in Windows or in your Color Sync folder in Mac.

 

SO NOW WHAT?

Once created, the profile will be available in the Color Settings dialog box in Photoshop—or other Adobe software (see Figure 4). Under the Settings menu you can choose a set of profiles that are primarily for conversion to color separations for offset lithography including North American, European and Asian pre-press working spaces. The Working Spaces field is where the RGB Menu is and where you’ll choose or load profiles for your RGB or inkjet printer. Choose More Options first, and then scroll down the menu to choose an RGB profile (see Figure 5). 

 

 

Many printers include pre-made or “canned” profiles with their driver software that can be accessed from the menu. These profiles were made for specific printing environments. They change RGB values of the image to match the color capabilities of the ink-set and the reflective qualities of the substrate to produce an on-screen image that mimics the potential gamut of the printer’s capabilities.

A custom printing environment is more accurate and preferable to the canned profiles, but of course, you’ll need to purchase the equipment to make one. You can load the profiles that you make from the top of the RGB Menu by choosing Load RGB. 

 

POLICIES

The items in the Color Management Policies field, program Photoshop to display warning boxes if a document has an embedded profile that does not match the current working space (see Figure 6). I recommend that you check the Profile Mismatch and Missing Profiles, Ask When Opening and Ask When Pasting check boxes so that when you open a document you will be informed if the embedded color space differs. You can choose to either convert the document to the current color space or preserve the document’s profile. 

 

EASY COLOR MANAGEMENT

I should mention one more thing that is a quick fix for color matching to your printer. You can work in a calibrated environment without the hassle of creating ICC profiles by paying an online service to do the profiling for you. For a fee they will e-mail you a target file that you print on the intended printer and paper. You snail-mail them the print, which they in turn scan with a spectrophotometer. Their software writes the profile and they e-mail it back to you. 

 

You can then load the profile from the Color Settings dialog box. This process is worth considering if you’re not in a heavy production environment that uses multiple printers and substrates. It’s easy and it saves the expense of purchasing a spectrophotometer and an automatic scanner bed. You should however, at a minimum, get your hands on a colorimeter to calibrate your monitor. 

 

I can recommend two websites that offer profiling services:

Cathy’s Profiles—www.cathysprofiles.com, and Watts Digital—www.wattsdigital.com/Home.html.

 

CONSISTENT, PREDICTABLE COLOR

Calibration is essential to producing consistently predictable color from your printer. Since ink sets are proprietary and substrates absorb ink and produce color differently, you should create a distinct profile for each printer and each paper that you use. Predictable color means less waste in time and materials. If consistent color is important to your workflow, the initial expense of a calibration system is well worth the money in that it eliminates the extra effort and materials required to reprint an unsatisfactory image.