Color Management with Mac OS X Panther A Technology Tour June 2004
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther Contents Page 3 Making Color Work for You Page 4 The ColorSync Foundation Making an Inventory of Your Profiles Obtaining and Assigning Color Profiles Page 9 Color Workflow: The Capture Phase Capturing Images Managing Untagged Images Converting to a Working Space Page 14 Color Workflow: The Edit Phase Calibrating and Profiling Your Display Editing Images Soft Proofing Sharing Soft Proofs Creating Hard-Copy Proofs Page 19 Color Workflow: The
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 3 Making Color Work for You As a creative professional, color is at the heart of your work. Accurate color that matches expectations makes a dramatic difference in reducing production costs and timetables, and in helping you generate more engaging visual products for clients. ColorSync: End-to-end color management Apple makes it easier to ensure that the color you see onscreen consistently matches the color in your final printed materials.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther The ColorSync Foundation Every device, from scanners to displays to printers, has unique color capabilities. Successful color management involves translating color accurately from one device to another across your workflow. Good color management starts with a color profile—a description of your device’s color characteristics.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 5 Making an Inventory of Your Profiles With Mac OS X Panther, you can manage color well—and automatically—using default profiles that Panther assigns. ColorSync Utility provides a central location and an intuitive means of managing all of your generic and custom profiles. Open ColorSync Utility in /Applications/Utilities. Click the Profiles icon to view installed profiles.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther Try comparing the gamuts of an RGB profile and a CMYK profile in ColorSync Utility. 1. Click Generic RGB Profile. 2. Click the triangle next to Lab Plot and select “Hold for comparison.” 3. Now click Generic CMYK Profile. The RGB profile is semitransparent, and you can see how the gamut of one device matches up against the other.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 7 Obtaining and Assigning Color Profiles If you need color profiles for your devices, several sources of profiles are available. You can: • Download profiles from device providers’ websites. Note that these profiles are generic factory profiles, not customized to your particular device. • If you send your files to a professional printer for output, ask the printer for profiles of their proofer or press.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 5. To override the factory profile with your custom profile, click the triangle next to Current Profile. 6. Choose Other. 7. Navigate to /Library/ColorSync/Profiles and select the profile you wish to use instead of the factory profile.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 9 Color Workflow: The Capture Phase Once you have created and installed profiles for the various devices in your workflow, you can start capturing images. When you bring images onto your Macintosh, you can greatly improve your ultimate color results with a few simple color management steps: • Color-manage images as you capture them. Image Capture • Convert images to a working space. • Manage untagged images.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 10 In addition, Image Capture is a comprehensive framework embedded in the operating system that can be used and accessed by any application to manage color. Image Capture also recognizes imaging devices automatically: Plug in your camera or scanner— or any mass storage device, such as an iPod, with a DCIM folder containing images—to your Mac. Image Capture recognizes the device and allows you to start working in a color-aware environment.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 11 Managing Untagged Images At times, you might need to work with an untagged image—one that does not have an embedded source profile. Untagged images can include: • Stock photography (TIFF or JPEG files) • An image emailed to you from Windows or Mac OS 9 • Legacy artwork • An image from the web When you receive an untagged image, it is important that you provide the tagging information right away.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 12 If you want to embed a specific color profile and tag your images automatically, AppleScript is another alternative. AppleScript is an English-like scripting language used to write files that automate the actions of your computer and the applications that run on it. 1. Navigate to /Library/Scripts/ColorSync. Embed chosen profile 2. Double-click the “Embed chosen profile” script. 3. Click OK. 4.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 13 You can write a simple automation routine in AppleScript to convert the device profile that Image Capture embeds in your images to your preferred working space. Here is a sample script to get you started. 1. Open the Script Editor application (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor). 2.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 14 Color Workflow: The Edit Phase Calibration products For maximum accuracy in calibrating and profiling your display or output device, you can use a hardware calibration device such as a colorimeter or a spectrophotometer. Colorimeters are most often used for calibrating displays. Spectrophotometers are used to calibrate and profile displays, and they are also useful for creating profiles for output devices such as printers.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 15 Calibrating and Profiling Your Display Your display is the window into everything you do. It plays a central role in all your color work. By calibrating your display and using a custom profile, you can trust the color you see on your display and view and modify color in your images more accurately. When you connect a display, your Macintosh queries it for industry-standard information.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 16 Editing Images Once you know you can trust what you see on your display, you can adjust the color in your images. Choose an application that is ICC aware, such as Adobe Photoshop. By using an ICC-aware application, you can ensure that the color information in your image will be appropriately managed as you make changes or move the image into the output phase of the color workflow. Soft Proofing Based on the Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 17 There is no need to click the Apply button unless you want to convert the color in your document to the profile chosen for soft proofing. If you click Apply, you will alter your original file, so you might want to choose Save As from the File menu and save a copy of the document, rather than overwriting your original file. Sharing Soft Proofs To share a soft proof with anyone else using Mac OS X v10.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther When the application sends your document to the printing system, your system will match the color in the document first to the profile selected in the Quartz Filter and then to the profile for your printer.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 19 Color Workflow: The Output Phase The output phase of the color workflow is most often associated with printing. The full integration of color management into Mac OS X Panther allows you to make fewer iterations on paper to achieve the results you want. In particular, you can: • Preview your color results before printing. • Take advantage of faster PostScript printing. • Manage a raster printer. • Create PDF/X files for professional printing.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther Late binding vs. early binding When ColorSync matches an image from a source profile to a destination profile, or when you apply a Quartz Filter, the actual data for the image is modified. Every time this happens, some information and accuracy is lost. 20 Checking Color Before You Print When you select Print from the File menu, the Print dialog includes a Preview button. One way of handling this problem is called “late binding.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 21 Printing to a Raster Printer A raster printer is a non-PostScript printer such as an inkjet printer. There are two ways to print color-managed files to a raster printer: • Use Photoshop to prematch your source data to a printer profile. Choose “Print with Preview” in Photoshop and then choose the printer profile. Turn off any color correction in the printer driver and print.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 22 Automating the Workflow The Macintosh platform provides a number of technologies and features that let you automate routine color management tasks, freeing up your time for the creative work and decision-making that can never be automated. About AppleScript AppleScript is the core automation technology built into Mac OS X, and it lets you automate a wide variety of tasks on your Mac, including color management.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther Running Scripts Here are some other ways you can run a color management script: • In Image Capture, choose the script from the Automated Task pop-up menu. • Attach the script to a folder using Folder Actions. When something related to the folder changes—such as putting an image into the folder—the script is triggered.
A Technology Tour Color Management with Mac OS X Panther 24 Resources To learn more about the topics mentioned in this tour, please consult these resources. Websites • ColorSync: www.apple.com/colorsync • Mac OS X: www.apple.com/macosx • Apple displays: www.apple.com/displays • AppleScript: www.apple.com/applescript • Macintosh Products Guide: www.apple.com/guide • Color Consistency and Adobe Creative Suite (PDF): www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/pdfs/cscolormgmt.pdf • Adobe profiles: www.adobe.
