Color Management for Digital Photographers

Digital Photography Color Management

A Digital Photographers Most Important Doo-Dad

Calibration ensures the consistency and correct configuration of your computers display. Profiling your calibrated display will enable ICC aware applications like Photoshop to present images with a much more accurate color and tone. Calibrating your monitor is super important when printing your own images, or even sending them out from printing.

Without calibrating your monitor, you’re going to waste a lot of ink and paper trying to get your colors right. Anarchy will arise in your life as your mental health takes a hit. With calibration, you can ensure you’re getting close results of printing images that match what you’re viewing on your colors display. You’ll get your mojo back too.

When calibrating your display, these characteristics are adjusted

Tonal Response (Gamma)
White Point (Color Temperature)
Black and White Luminance

After going through the process of creating a new or updated display profile, the profile is then loaded automatically into your computers video card at system startup, thus allowing applications that check the characteristics from the calibration data to properly render your images more accurately on screen. It makes a HUGE difference. I just the LCD display on my new HP DV7 laptop, and the difference is remarkable. Now that I’m calibrated and the display profile created by the calibration process has been set my editing applications will automatically use the profile when displaying colors on the display.

In this example of the standard industry color chart (it is used by Datacolor and others) comparison of before and after calibration, my HP Dv7 laptop came shipped with a display that was too bright, had yellows that were over-saturated, with a horrendous cyan/blue cast overall. By calibrating, I got much closer to normal colors, white and black points. Prints come out very close (its never perfect) to what I see on my display. Skin tones never lie, and are the hardest to get right. As you can see in the After Calibration image, they are pretty close (unless your display that you’ve viewing this on is wonky (a technical term for “messed up”).