Datasheet

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■ PUTTING COLOR MANAGEMENT IN CONTEXT
O• pen the ideal exposures from the shade and tungsten lighting shots in the
color calibration software (X-Rite or Adobe), build a camera profile, and then
save it.
S• et this calibration profile as a camera default in either Lightroom or ACR.
I encourage you to tweak your calibrations to suit your personal preferences.
You shouldn’t necessarily accept the numerically accurate renderings of the color
patches—most of us don’t sell pictures of ColorChecker targets. Think about how you
prefer your color. More contrast? More saturation? Put these into your camera default
settings so you don’t have to tweak every file every time.
Remember, you are calibrating a complete capture system that includes the
lens. You can usually count on lenses from the same manufacturer to have the same
color bias, but as soon as you switch to a different manufacturer (a third-party lens),
you will likely affect the subtle color bias and you’ll need a different calibration. For
that reason, I recommend staying with your camera manufacturer’s lenses whenever
possible.
Finally, calibration is no substitute for creativity. Feel free to break away from
rigidly accurate color renderings to suit your creative needs or the needs of your cli-
ents. Your calibration settings are only a starting point from which you are obligated
to depart on a journey to your personal vision. You should also save creative render-
ings as presets that you can call on for different purposes. The calibration method
outlined here should be considered a tool to allow you control over your photography
and not an end in itself.
Putting Color Management in Context
Color management is a relatively new discipline that is still evolving. The goal of color
management is to control color appearance in various input and output devices so
we can achieve better agreement between the different renderings of the same image
viewed in different media. Notice that we are specifically not talking about color
matching. Real color matching is currently impossible, and some level of difference
has to be tolerated. There is considerable disagreement about what differences are
tolerable under what conditions, so talking about color management in absolutes is
difficult. Control over color is highly desirable, however, whether or not we agree on
how that control is applied.
Color management starts by attempting to define color in an unambiguous
way. Not too long ago a group of manufacturers in the graphics industry got together
and developed the ICC profile as the foundation for a digital color definition. An
ICC profile references the color appearance of a particular device (camera, monitor,
printer) to a numerical representation that is independent of any specific device. This
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