At some point during your journey to become a better photographer you will stumble (or crash!) into the issue of color management and monitor calibration. This topic PLAGUED me for months – I almost gave up all together because it was SO confusing to me but I’m really glad I stuck it out. I’m going to share some basics here, if you have any questions please let me know and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability.

First, an example of an image edited the way I inteded it to look on my calibrated system:

and now what it would look like if I weren’t calibrated (too much red!)

And now a few facts about color management and calibration:

1 ) What is Monitor Calibration? Monitor calibration is done by buying a software package like the sypder2 express (which I used) which comes with the software and hardware (A little alien spaceship looking thingy that you hang on your screen.)  You install the software and then put the hardware on when it tells you to and then it runs your monitor through a series of colors while the hardware reads the way those colors are coming through your monitor. Then, based on the results it creates a “monitor profile” and stores it in your computer and sets your computer to read that profile in certain “color managed” programs.  Which brings me to…

2) What are “color managed” programs? Only CERTAIN  programs, applications, browsers and even operating systems are color managed meaning that they will obey the “ICC color profile” that is embedded in your images.  What are those programs? For starters, serious image editing programs like Photoshop and Lightroom and also browsers like Firefox and Safari.  Internet explorer does NOT. This means that once you actually calibrate you may be really frustrated because your images seem to look completely different depending on how you view them! They may look different on firefox compared to your computer and internet explorer. It can all get very confusing.

3) Why is it so important to color manage? If you don’t color manage, you are editing your images based on no known “correct” set of standards. Almost ALL monitors come factory configured to be much too blue/cool, which means that you will try to achieve pleasing skintones in your images but because your monitor is showing you too much blue, you will end up adding too much yellow or warmth to compensate!  This will be particularly evident if you try to get your images printed at a professional quality printer (such as WHCC which I use, or MPIX which I recommend as well).  They will NOT look like what you see on your monitor, unless your monitor HAPPENS to be perfectly calibrated which is highly unlikely!

4) Ok, that sounds so easy! What is so confusing about monitor calibration? Well, to start with, I found it confusing (and no body told me) that you actually should not choose your monitor profile as your color settings in photoshop. You should always leave those settings as Adobe SRGB North America All purpose.  Photoshop is already adjusting the way you see your images by accessing your monitor profile’s  LUT (look up table) that it created when you calibrated and showing that to you.

Then – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT – you MUST have “Convert to SRGB” and “Embedd ICC profile” checked when you save your JPGS out of photoshop, otherwise your images will NOT be correctly read by anyone (yourself included!) who views them on the web even in a color managed browser! If you don’t included the ICC profile the images are considered “untagged” and the results will be anyone’s guess.

5) The type of monitor you have does matter. My home computer is a nice Dell XPS that came with a gorgeous looking and 22inch glossy wide gamut monitor that was big and fabulous.. or so I thought. The problem is that the version of the calibration software I have doesn’t work with either glossy or wide gamut -I would need the spyder 3 for that.  In fact, even with spyder3 software wide gamut shows more vivid colors which seems great, but is dangerous for photo editing. What was happening was that the colors would look rich and gorgeous to me but when I would view them at work or other monitors they looked dull and lifeless! I wasn’t adding as much saturation as I really needed to. In the end I switched my gorgeous big monitor for a smaller non glossy version that I KNOW is color correct.  And I know that because..

6) Do a test match print from where you plan on printing photos. I use WHCC for my prints and when you set up a wholesale account with them you upload 5 images and they send you 5 prints and you look to make sure they are what you see on your screen.  Even if you use a good consumer lab like MPIX you should also do this to double check  profile and set up.  After all, the ultimate goal of color managing is making sure that your prints are what you see on your screen so there are no unpleasant surprises.

I hope that wasn’t too confusing. You may not be thinking about this yet, but at some point in your journey of learning photography you will probably end up needing to.

Until then, have a great weekend!

Filed under: photography by ariana
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