Color management, ICC profiles, etc.- A Dummy's Guide?

[John Lovaas]

Well, I'm shooting in RAW format now and loving it, picked up a set of QpCards-

http://www.qpcard.com

and the QpColorsoft freeware and am loving that too. I imagine I'll be lookng for a terabyte sized hard drive in the near future(I back up to both optical and magnetic media).

Can anyone direct me to some not-hideously-expensive color management tutorial resources? Most of the seminars in the area are in the $400-$600 range(a universal law- all one day seminars, regardless of subject or utility, must have a minimum price of $400), and the gold standard color management software appears to be Adobe Photoshop(currently priced at $650). Should have bought a copy when I still had student status last year. Doh.

I'm now interested in learning just what the hell I am doing in regards to "color management". Not to sound like an old codger, but "when I was young", we used densitometers and adjusted film chemistries and generally cursed a lot. And it was a five mile walk uphill to the darkroom- six miles if it snowed. If anyone would like some Macbeth analog densitometers(analog- as in they have a bunch of vacuum tubes inside), just holler ;-) I've got 4 or 5 in the garage, at last count.


jl

[Steven Johnson]

"when I was young", we used densitometers and adjusted film chemistries and generally cursed a lot. And it was a five mile walk uphill to the darkroom- six miles if it snowed.

Hah! You were lucky. We didn't have color... hell, we didn't even have black and white. We had to make do with black. I have an entire albums of pictures shot using only black.

[Darklight]

An el-cheapo Pantone Colorvision SpyderPRO monitor calibration device and "Camera RAW with Adobe PhotoshopCS" solved a bunch of my profile issues....

[Cheryl Jones]

Hah! You were lucky. We didn't have color... hell, we didn't even have black and white. We had to make do with black. I have an entire albums of pictures shot using only black.

Cheryl

[John Lovaas]

Hi Chris-

Thanks for the info on the SpyderPro calibrators; I only thought they had expensive ones. I've seen them in the B&H catalog before. I see they have a basic monitor calibrator for $79 now!

http://www.colorvision.com/profis/profi ... jsp?id=581

I also found this Pantone device as well-

http://www.pantone.com/products/product ... roduct=103

I will look into getting a copy of the Adobe book you referenced. Is that written by Chris Fraser? I've found a really good, really reasonable lab in Chicago-

http://www.deltaquest.net

that works with Kodak's Metallic Endura paper. I am an old fan of Cibachrome- hoho, now there's a blast from the past- and Metallic Endura has some of the same characteristics. Deltaquest provides ICC profiles for customers to use, and I understand that this will help with color matching and correction- but that is quite literally all I understand.

Learning how to use Walls, learning how to use Illustrator, and now- PhotoshopCS, I guess. My brain hurts. ;-)

jl

[Ralph E. Powers]

"when I was young", we used densitometers and adjusted film chemistries and generally cursed a lot. And it was a five mile walk uphill to the darkroom- six miles if it snowed.

Hah! You were lucky. We didn't have color... hell, we didn't even have black and white. We had to make do with black. I have an entire albums of pictures shot using only black.

Uhh, that's because the lens cap is on I believe.

Ok seriously... using the card when you shoot your picutres... basically you take two shots of the same thing? One to help the camera find the right balance or to help YOU find the right (color) balance when working with the images in adobe or whatever photo-editing programme you use? then the next photo is without the card and supposedly to match??

Or I just don't get it?

[Dave Bunnell]

At one time I thought I needed something like color management and then I read a book by Dan Margulis called "Professional Photoshop" color correction, retouching and image manipulation."

Dan stresses just how much you can do by getting to know how to sample the colors in images and adjust them based on that information. One trick he has is to meter on skin tones. Basically there should only be about a quarter the amount of cyan there as yellow or magenta. Most color casts I see in digitals or slide scans often seem to be too much cyan.

I've also been impressed with how well Photoshop can handle basic color correction automatically, either by using "auto" under "Levels" or by selecting your white and black points in an image.

I deal with many printers and none of them have ever had any concerns about color profiles, other than that some of them offer their own profiles for color separations for RGB to CMYK, and I can use them without having any sort of color management system.

Dave

[John Lovaas]

basically you take two shots of the same thing? One to help the camera find the right balance or to help YOU find the right (color) balance when working with the images in adobe or whatever photo-editing programme you use? then the next photo is without the card and supposedly to match??

Hi Ralph-

If you are talking about the QpCard, you would take one picture of the card under whatever lighting conditions you would be working under for that session- be it a sunny day, a particular set of flashes or flashbulbs, etc.

Then you bring the card photo into the QpCard software and voila- a color profile is created. It is based on the numerous tones present on the QpCard and their precise values- the cards are not printed, but actually painted. By determining the color shift in these standardized tones, an automatic color correction can be applied to all the images you shot under those identical conditions.

Back in the olden days, one would shoot a Kodak color chart and grey card at the beginning of each shooting session on a roll, and that image would give you the ballpark information to set up color correction values for the rest of the session's images. In addition, you would buy bricks of film from the same emulsion batch to further aid in color consistency.

A brick of film. -sigh-

I agree with Dave- becoming proficient with Photoshop is more than enough for everyone. I'm just interested in what "the man behind the curtain" is doing. ;-) Or maybe it is an unquenchable thirst for useless information.

jl

[Ralph E. Powers]

Hi Ralph-

If you are talking about the QpCard, you would take one picture of the card under whatever lighting conditions you would be working under for that session- be it a sunny day, a particular set of flashes or flashbulbs, etc.

Then you bring the card photo into the QpCard software and voila- a color profile is created. It is based on the numerous tones present on the QpCard and their precise values- the cards are not printed, but actually painted. By determining the color shift in these standardized tones, an automatic color correction can be applied to all the images you shot under those identical conditions.

jl

Well basically you're talking about putting the card in every time you move to a new location in the cave. One would think that the lighting conditions would be consistent but they're not because someone else who wasn't around when you took photo #12 at survey station AB-24 is now around at station AB 30... true they can turn their lights off and so on but you know what I mean.

But do you HAVE to have THAT software or would Adobe work ... right now I'm just using ACDSee 8 (because I got it free) and in-so-far have been pleased with the results I've been able to do... still got those pesky dust motes floating in the pics now-and-again but hey!

[John Lovaas]

Hi Ralph-

For in-cave work, you'd only shoot the card once for the day- unless you were using a different set of flashes or flashbulbs at each shooting location, which would be pretty unlikely.

The color temperature of flashes can vary from unit to unit, and your camera's idea of what is "white" can vary as well. Like Dave mentioned, a lot of cameras lean towards the blue(or cyan) side.

Conversely, some folks have trouble detecting shifts in color. I have a hell of a time determining if a print is too red. I almost lost my first job out of college(custom printing in a commercial lab), because my prints were consistently too red. What I thought was a "touch of warmth" was an extreme annoyance to the commercial photographers who knew exactly what he was shooting. After that, when I thought a print was OK on color, I'd knock about 5 points of magenta off of it and the customer would be thrilled.

The QpCard takes a lot of guesswork out of color balance issues.

jl

[Stubb]

John,

I highly recommend getting and carefully reading a copy of "Real World Color Management" by Bruce Fraser et al. It gives a thorough walk-through of color management from capture to output, including calibrating devices and creating/using profiles. I've been much happier with my prints since setting up a fully color managed workflow.

There's no middle ground with color management. Either set up the full monty or don't bother.

Cheers,

Andreas