Photographers who do their own colour image editing in the digital darkroom tend to have a love/hate relationship with colour. They use colour as their way to express creativity, and they love what they are, able to express through colour. They capture light on film or with digital sensors, but they do so much more than capture the light. They control that light through various lenses, filters, editing techniques, and printing methods. Nothing provides more satisfaction for the photographer than to use all the tools at their disposal to blend the palette of colours into a beautiful image.
And yet, as much as photographers love colour, it seems nothing can frustrate them as easily as when colours don't match, or the colour they expected isn't produced. Making the final print match what they envisioned when they clicked the shutter can present a tremendous challenge, particularly when you consider how many steps the image must pass through from capture to final print.
Colour management provides the tools to ensure that the photographer is able to produce a print in the digital darkroom with predictable colour. The tools to do so are available; however, learning what they are and how to properly use them seems to be one of the most misunderstood issues in digital imaging.
The complexity of colour management is partly due to the number of components involved in working with digital images. Capture devices, such as digital cameras and film scanners, read the colour in the original image. A monitor displays the colour that is stored within the digital image file and provides the photographer with a visual representation on which to base adjustments to the image. Software settings determine the available colours in the image file. Finally, a printer attempts to reproduce the colours stored in the image file. Each of these components must be controlled to ensure proper colour throughout the workflow.
Colour management revolves around profiles, and those profiles provide a common translation for colour throughout the colour-managed workflow. You can build a custom profile for your digital camera or scanner so that the colours recorded are as true to the scene that was photographed as possible. A custom profile also ensures that the colour information in the image file is presented accurately by the monitor, because the values are translated to those that will produce accurate colour on the monitor. This ensures that when you adjust the image, you are doing so based on an accurate view of the image and, therefore, the adjustments will truly produce the results you intend. Finally, when it comes time to print the image, a profile translates the numbers in the image file to the appropriate colour information for the, printer, resulting in a print that accurately reflects the colour information in the image file.
Later, I'll address each of the components of the digital darkroom in turn, providing solutions to achieve accurate and consistent colour through the full process of optimizing your digital images.
Limitations of Colour Management
I hate to burst your bubble, but colour management isn't perfect. If you are reading this and hoping to suddenly be able to produce a print that is indistinguishable from the display on your monitor, I'm going to have to bring you back down to earth.
Understanding the limitations of colour management is just as important as understanding how colour management works and what is involved in implementing a good colour-managed workflow. We still don't have a complete understanding of all aspects of human vision, and new technology related to colour is continually being developed. We have come a long way in understanding colour and implementing colour management solutions, but it isn't a perfect science.
Although you can achieve excellent results with a colour management system, having realistic expectations is important. For example, the holy grail of colour management for photographers is a print that matches the monitor. You need to understand that a print will never look exactly like the image on the monitor. For one thing, both use very different mediums to present an image. A monitor emits light to present an image, while a print depends upon reflected light. Although the colours themselves can be very accurate, the experience of viewing each image is very different. The monitor is able to produce an image that is very luminous, by virtue of the fact that the image is actually composed of emitted light. Prints, on the other hand, will never be quite as luminous because they depend upon reflected light.
Evaluating your prints requires a certain amount of interpretation. If you understand the different properties of the different devices used in a colour-managed workflow, you'll better understand the limitations of colour management.
Of course, that doesn't mean you can't expect excellent results with a proper colour-managed workflow. Quite the contrary, you can achieve incredibly accurate prints that exactly reflect what you intended the image to look like. Although it is important to understand that there are limitations in colour management, you can get excellent results with an appropriate workflow.
One point I would emphasize is that while you may not get prints that exactly match what you see on the monitor in all respects, you can achieve predictable results. If you accept the inherent limitations involved, you can learn to interpret the results you achieve, learn to get the most accurate results, and ensure that you can get consistent, accurate, and predictable output for your images.