01.11
If you Google a bit, you can find a lot of articles telling you whether you should or should not do color management. I thought: oh well, the Internet could probably use another one…
What is color management? Color Management is a collection of technologies which allows you to calibrate/profile your devices, to a shared color model. And if done correctly photo’s made with your camera will be displayed with accurate colors on your screen, and will be printed with accurate colors as well.
First lets get some misconceptions out of the way. The most important one, being that color management makes your photos better. Which isn’t even false, but it isn’t true either, it’s just a senseless statement. Color management is about accuracy. And getting accurate color, can make your photo’s “better”, but it can also make your photo’s “worse”. This is because most device vendors, never design their devices to be accurate, they design their devices to render pretty colors, which usually means bright and vibrant colors. In which case, color managed photo’s might look dull. On the other hand, getting accurate colors is generally a good starting point before making them “pretty” yourself.
The second misconception is that color management will make your hardware better. If you have a crappy camera, screen or printer, color management will not save your day. Color management needs room to work with and all devices have a limited range of color they can represent. Color management will not increase that range (called gamut), it has to work within it. Therefore you should invest in good hardware before you invest in color management (more tips on that later).
The third misconception is that most recent (consumer) devices are already accurate/calibrated, which is just nonsense. Manufacturer design devices to automatically produce pretty colors, for consumers to love without any hassle. Lots of things are pretty dull in the real world, so lot’s of camera’s pimp your colors automatically. Color adjustment on some devices can even be dynamic, which means the image is analyzed first, and adjustment are calculated for this specific image, so the adjustments can vary from image to image. So out of the box (consumer) hardware is not accurate at all!
Having said that… There is no law, that colors have to be accurate… There is nothing wrong with making things pretty. If you like what your camera, screen and/or printer is doing to your colors, great, by all means, don’t burden yourself with color management.
If you’re not happy with what your hardware is doing automatically, and crave some accuracy, than color management might be for you… The bad news is that color management is pretty complicated, and understanding the basics of color management can really save you some headaches. Beware color management is complicated enough to make grown men cry. And as of this writing this is especially true for open source color management… Before actually buying any hardware I highly recommend you buy a good book on the topic. I personally found Real World Color Management excellent, mainly because the better part of the book focusses on general concepts, not specific software.
