The Psychology of Color Management and Calibration

[Richard Lynch-2]

The cliche experience that many have had is watching a family member
trying to master the color on the family TV set. The people-centric
medium of TV makes us to look at images where the color being off
becomes unbearable and unnatural because skin tones just look wrong. We
all know what skin tones should look like so we are compelled to change
the screen to make the skin tones look as we expect. It's natural to
trust that the color being broadcast to your TV is correct, only
changing the settings on the TV can make it right. Hopeful TV color
experts twiddle the controls trying to achieve a vague balance that only
they can, while everyone else sits idly looking on hoping thing would be
alright soon, impatient with the technology, wondering why it can't just
be right in the first place -- or if adjusting it is the thing that is
screwing it up.

People are more apt to assume that what they see on their computer
monitor is accurate when they pull it out of the box. Monitors are not
constantly replete with skin tones that remind us that something may be
off, as you spend considerable time using it for other activities like
checking email or word-processing, which has nothing to do with skin
tones at all. When a digital photographer sees a face, it might more
often be in Photoshop, where they just change the color with tools in
the program offered for that type of control. Regretfully, changing the
color and trusting what you see in Photoshop and on your monitor can
lead to martian prints and web postings of people in your images, and a
quandary: why should color that looks correct in one place be off or
plain wrong in another.

The answer is Color Management.

As they say, a little knowledge can be dangerous. Knowing enough to
adjust the color in Photoshop doesn't turn out to be enough to make the
color right. While some will come to the conclusion that the poor
results have something to do with color management, just what they need
to do to work with color management is less clear. They may revert to
familiar territory and seek out the computer's brightness, contrast and
color controls figuring this is how they have to make adjustments
fiddling like you might do with a TV. They might get close and even get
lucky with this method, but generally nothing could be worse.
Adjustments made with the monitor controls as a means of color
management end up being a best guess at what everything should look like
on screen, and a compromise much like the TV expert's attempts at
balancing RGB with the primitive TV controls. Guessing is not a good
approach to color.

Some may go a little further and read a few web postings that have to do
with adjusting color on their monitor, and these will range from the
incorrect to the absurdly simple to the horribly technical ones that you
are not quite sure are written in English. Naturally, the
TV-color-minded inclination that "it is just color, how complicated
could it be..." pushes people more toward accepting the absurdly simple
and incorrect approaches. Some may take it a step further to seek out
help from an expert (who may be anyone from a well-respected authority
in Photoshop or color management to a neighbor who knows "a bunch about
computers"). Regretfully the better answers (like the book Real World
Color Management <http://aps8.com/color_management.html>  by Fraser,
Murphy and Bunting, a 500+ page book) may be long and involved and
daunting from the outset. On the other hand, getting the color right
doesn't require getting a college degree in the subject, and such
extensive study may be unnecessary for common folk, who, after all, just
want the right color.

Those who want the right color without the doctorate end up taking
suggestions from friends or people on forums, or look for the 'right'
way to set up their color management. Truth be told, there is not one
right way: more than one method will work. In fact, any method of color
management that makes sense will work...but the other side of the coin
is: the same color management scheme just doesn't work for everyone, and
some will work better than others. The best way to get the color right
and pick an applicable color management scheme, is, in my opinion,
understanding the shorthand version of what you want to achieve and
applying the simplest steps possible to get there.

The basics of color management requires:

    *   Calibrating your monitor
    * Creating an ICC profile (usually part of step 1)
    * Setting up color management in Photoshop or Elements (and perhaps
other programs) correctly
    * Setting up previews/screen proofing that make sense (Photoshop, not
Elements)
    * Applying appropriate color tagging to your images

If you neglect any one of these, you are gambling with your color
results, plain and simple. If you do a few and not the others, you are
not necessarily any better off than doing none at all. More frustrating,
if you don't do them all, things may work sometimes, and not others, and
you'll never be able to tell why. But attack each of these components
with the intent to know why they are important, how they apply, and how
to apply them, and you'll have the skeleton of color management, which
is enough to hang your color on. You get skin on your skeleton when you
define the purpose of what you are trying to achieve. Do you print to
the same printer all the time? Do you print to many? Do you post images
to the web exclusively? Do you print and post? Do images all come from
the same camera? Do you have many sources of images (multiple cameras,
images from friends, clients, etc.)? All these questions filter into
your color management choice.

This is not the first time I've mentioned color management in my blog,
and it won't be the last. Here are some other Color Management entries:

    * What Color Space Do I Use? (Part 1)
<http://www.hiddenelements.com/blog/2007_05_01_hiddenelements_archive.ht\
ml>
    * What Color Space Do I Use (Part 2)
<http://www.hiddenelements.com/blog/2007_06_01_hiddenelements_archive.ht\
ml>
    * Calibrating My Home Printer
<http://www.hiddenelements.com/blog/2007_01_01_hiddenelements_archive.ht\
ml>

These additional resources should give you some background on making
better color management choices.

For more info on approaching color management seriously, I have a 4 week
primer course at betterphoto.com called From Monitor to Print
<http://www.betterphoto.com/courseOverview.asp?cspID=175>  that will
work you through these 5 essentials, and test your results, making you
color competent in a short amount of time with the least amount of work.
You'll want to look into good calibration tools like the ColorVision
Spyder <http://aps8.com/spyder.html>  (by the way, I posted an article
on 9.11.08 about  using the ColorVision Spyder Express to calibrate a
dual monitor system
<http://photoshopcs.com/cheap_dual_monitor_calibration_spyder.html>  --
which the manufacturer says is impossible). You can also simplify your
color life by finding a system and sticking to it (don't change
printers, papers, profiles, inks, or services without a plan).

Competent color handling is more than just calibration, but don't get
psyched out. Make the effort to know what to do, and you can put it
safely behind you.