How much colour management do you need? Which aspects are essential for photography

hi i'm keith cooper norflight images and in this short video i'm going to talk about colour management um colour management can be a very complex subject but it doesn't have to be there are lots of different aspects of color management that impinge on your photography particularly if you do printing but the whole workflow from taking the photograph through to printing or just viewing it on a screen is all affected by your choices of color management the question i get asked a lot is how much of this stuff do i actually need um and depending on what it is you actually want to do it turns out that there are some bits which are essential and some bits which are nice to have and some bits are well just fun to do if you really want to but you probably don't really need to unless you're working professionally at a fairly high end and stuff uh when you can afford all this kit anyway so what should we start off with um well there's a monitor uh this is a very good monitor it's a benq 32 inch sw sw 320 it has an adobe 98 gamut wide gamut displays a lot of colors it's very accurate it's very good even out of the box it's very accurate every photo i take for my work every print i make is viewed on my screen so really i don't want to skimp on the screen so i ideally want a good quality screen doesn't have to be a huge great thing like this doesn't have to be at quite this level of specification but certainly a good screen is essential for certainly for my work when i've got the screen i need to calibrate it now calibration is setting the screen to a known state and your color management software most of which by the way goes on invisibly behind the scenes uh on your computer you really don't think about it most the time it's what makes a display work it's what makes printers work but when you do have to think about it there are a few little adjustments and various things you can do so first of all i've got a good screen i want to calibrate that screen i want to set it to a known point now because i'm videoing this i've set this monitor to a fairly low color temperature um it's part of a soft proofing setup that benq have with this that i have looked at briefly but i'm not going to here i just reduced the color temperature of the monitor to make it a bit more visible on the video which is set to the color temperature of the room here which is probably about 3100 k i've dropped the color temperature of this just purely to make a bit more visible however calibration you need one of these um this is an i1 display pro there are quite a few different versions of calibrators you don't need to get the absolute best to get good results because what you'll often find is that the better calibrators are the same basic measuring device which just measures the screen and produces a profile and calibrates your monitor you don't need the very best quality of software because they're all the same device and the options you get in the higher end packages more expensive packages are often things you probably won't need and i've got reviews of loads of these bits of kit on the north flight images website goes into stuff in quite a bit of detail but this is just an overview so yes you do need a calibrator but you don't need to spend a fortune on one similarly worrying about the settings to use for your monitor take the defaults if you don't know why you would want to change from the default settings take that as a pretty strong hint that you probably don't need to i'm that we need to get a book on colour management and learn a lot more about it it's entirely up to you but one of these will measure your screen and produce a profile for it the profile tells the computer software what the characteristics of the screen are calibration sets your screen to a known standard has known brightness and known point so that's we've set that up we've set up the screen what else do i need well if i'm printing i need to make color profiles my printer and my paper or do i um turns out that most printers these days certainly if you start off with the original equipment manufacturers papers so canon papers and a canon printer epson printers epson papers on an epson printer you'll get good results using the profiles that they supply many third-party paper suppliers will produce profiles as well and some if you buy some paper off them will even make custom profiles for you now the profile is what adapts between the colors of your image and what's going to be printed think of it as a sort of private translation i've i've done a short video about printer profiles and what they do but they are essential steps in getting good reliable print results now the question i often get asked is how do i match my screen to my print when you you can't essentially one is reflecting light one is emitting light and um basically they're different so you're never gonna get them the same the absolute worst way to check your print against the screen is to put it up to the monitor like that and just try and check like that will rarely work you need good lighting to view your prints um and also when you're editing if your screen's too bright then your screen your prints may well come out a bit too dark in fact the most obvious most common problem of people when they get prints coming out too dark is that their screen's too bright so they over compensate one way and it comes out as dark prints but anyway printing is another matter which i'll go into but essentially i'm saying yes you need printer profiles but you don't need to make them yourself you don't need to make them yourself well you can this is uh a i1 studio it follows on from x riot's color monkey similar to very similar device this one's a spectrophotometer it allows you to print out colored targets you print out colored targets and you measure them with this device as a usb device run through the software that generates your printer profile well there you go who needs more you've made your own printer profiles um the only problem is that it's quite likely that the printer manufacturer and even the paper company that's provided your profiles has far better kit and far better software than this so why would you want to make your own profiles well it's a question i ask a lot of people when they say well they want to buy one of these or something more expensive they are useful you can learn a lot about printing in making your own profiles but it's something that you do because you want to do not always because you have to do certainly these days where printers are a lot more consistent and reliable 15 years ago making your own print profiles that was a really good step in getting good print quality now with printers a lot better and the wide availability of printer profiles something like this is less useful now you can use this for all kinds of other things you can use this for measuring the screen to replace one of these so you can use it for calibrating the screen and there are a few other things you can do with it as well but um i have numerous reviews of this and more advanced equipment as well so there you go we've got a monitor we calibrated it good monitor we've used that we're using printer profiles to get the best printer results you may or may not choose to make your own printer profiles why not it's fun to do but don't let it distract you from the real problem that most photographers face in getting prints that they don't like is that photographs aren't good enough how do you take better photographs won't you take more photographs how about color management for cameras this is what i get asked a lot here's a color checker card that i take with me on most jobs i can by taking a photograph of this target here create a camera profile i can think oh yes printer profiles monitor profiles camera profiles why wouldn't i want to do a camera profile well it turns out that it's far more difficult to get meaningful results from a camera profile than it is from a monitor profile or a printer profile i'd go so far as to say that for most photographers most times making camera profiles is a waste of time why do i take this with me then on most of my jobs because i do shoot in different types of lighting i change my lighting from time to time and also i work in conditions with variable lighting so in factories and the like by taking a photograph of this and making camera profile i can know that i'm getting accurate color now it's also for studio photography where you match it up for the camera to your lights if you're doing product photography you want to make sure that the colors are correct and that you don't get them the wrong way around because if you do get them the wrong way around it shows however the most important part of this is not this colored part it's that it's a grey card take photograph that grey card white balance your camera and most of the time you'll get much better looking results when you process your image shoot raw as well because that gives you the ability to do the adjustments which you wouldn't necessarily be able to do otherwise so there you have it um we have camera color management nice occasional uses for it i don't bother most the time monitor color management absolutely essential printer color management vital to get good quality prints making your own profiles fun on occasions but i wouldn't necessarily want to do it all the time it's interesting i put i do it in all my printer reviews really just to show the characteristics of the printer but fun but i wouldn't necessarily buy one so there you have it and there's color management in a nutshell and that's all you need to worry about now i'm going to have a lot more dipping into details of this but this is an outline that tries to answer that question should i bother so yes but don't go overboard on it hope that's been of use do check out the other videos on the channel subscribe please if you find it interesting and also do check the norflight images website because i've been writing articles there for years and there's loads of detailed stuff about color management and various things you can use for it so thank you very much

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 2,224

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Id: Y1eXy9sLkcQ

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021