Now youre done with the most basic first step. Youve chosen a Color Space to reference all your images and you now understand a bit of the technical challenges to at least be cautious when managing your digital workflow. Whats next?

Making Your Monitor Right

For the next step - if you havent guessed we havent done anything so far that affects what we can physically see. We havent messed with the monitor or the printing process yet. All weve done is establish a reference system thats repeatable and usable by anyone else through our chosen Color Space. Fortunately for me, Adobe 98 is widely accepted which significantly improves the odds that the colors I see on my system will match those of someone elses, assuming of course theyre as picky about color management as I.

What were going to do now is deal with your images first opportunity to be viewed by you. Were going to setup color management for your monitor. First and foremost you have to realize not all monitors are created equal. Even though two may be built exactly the same, one right after the other, each one will exhibit its own characteristics and display colors slightly differently. You cannot count on the manufactures tight building tolerances to make your monitor behave exactly like the one they designed and referenced off back at the factory. Its a fact of digital imaging life no two monitors are the same and youll have to account for their individual characteristics in your digital workflow.

The next less obvious thing to know in monitor profiling is how you display your final printed image and the associated monitor profile will significantly affect its appearance to you the viewer. For example, if you profile your monitor to simulate a incandescent viewing situation, tweak the image necessary, print them as desired, but view them under halogen lights instead, your images will have a decided blue cast to them. The problem here is you profiled your monitor and edited the image with the computer simulating the addition of a warm slightly yellow incandescent light. But, in actual practice you didnt add the light quality of an incandescent light by instead displaying it under a halogen light. A slight warm yellow quality from the light was missing from your image. This means that along with developing a profile for your monitor to account for its individual nature, you are also taking into account how the image will be displayed in its final form when making a monitor profile.

How do we do all this and create our monitor profiles? There are two ways. One is using a manual adjustment built into Adobe Photoshop or your computers system software. The other is using a highly refined and calibrated hardware development system. I prefer to use the latter mostly because I dont think anyone has discerning enough eyesight to manually create a profile. Its just too hard.

Where does this monitor profile stuff jive with everything weve discussed previously? Remember, your image exists within the Color Space reference system weve previously chosen. In my case I use Adobe 98. I like to term the image in that Color Space as the truth. The challenge is to get the truth so you can see and edit it on your monitor. Thats where the monitor profile comes in. Its the conduit by which the truth is transformed to be displayed on your monitor. The concept here is since the actual image is referenced in a broadly used Color Space like Adobe 98, the monitor profile is only there to account for the uniqueness of your monitor and your desired display conditions. If you gave your file to another fellow digital imager that had a highly calibrated monitor, he would take your highly referenced Adobe 98 Color Space image file and see essentially the same image on his monitor as you had on yours. His monitor profile would take the truth from the file and do the necessary conversions to make your image appear in all its glory on his computer monitor. All this monitor profile is doing is making a conversion so the truth moves from the Color Space youve chosen to the monitor. Whew, is this long enough?

The simple matter now is to use a hardware calibration system to build a unique profile for your monitor and proposed viewing conditions--I use Greytag Macbeth's Eye-1. Once that's done, adjust your computer system to use your new monitor profile. This step is exclusive of your image editing program. This makes sense since monitor profiles are designed to make everything the monitor display show the "truth", not just what's being worked in your image editor.

Heres one very big gotcha in this Color Space and monitor profile stuff. They are not one in the same. A monitor profile is not a Color Space. You do not use a monitor profile as the Color Space for your image. If you for some reason decide to use a monitor profile as an images Color Space, the truth will only reside on you monitor for the single, isolated set of circumstances when your monitor matches its profile. Did I already say monitors age over time and therefore periodically need to be profiled to ensure your workflows color fidelity? As a result, once a monitor ages slightly the profile's utility is lost, which causes the references to your Color Space to be less than useful. Sure were talking tiny changes but for anyone thats picky about consistent color this is an important concept. I bring up this point because monitor profiles on computersshoot, the same applies to all profiles including those for printersexist on your computer in exactly the same folder as your Color Space.

Early in my career as a digital photographer I mistakenly used my monitor profile as my Color Space with obvious problems. I made that mistake because I didnt understand the role the Color Space plays as the backbone of your digital workflow. Also, Ill claim I was sent down the wrong path by the feature of all image editing programs. When choosing a Color Space for your working environment, the selection options allow you to choose any and all of your profiles; monitor, printer, and Color Space alike. Right next to your Adobe 98 Color Space selection will be the monitor profile you just built. It can be very confusing and the software isnt designed to help. Imagine that! For some reason the computer geniuses out there put all your different color profiles in the same location regardless of their purposes. Don't be lulled into thinking like me to choose your monitor profile as your Color Space for all the reasons I've previously mentioned.

Making Your Print Right

Where are we now? So far weve established our color management system that references off a well-defined Color Space. Weve established the backbone for color fidelity for our workflow. Next, we worked a monitor profile to allow us to see the truth with consistency. Whats next? If youre like me, you consider the whole point of photography is to make prints to receive the well-deserved adulations from your maniac fans. Making an outstanding print is the whole point of this business. Unfortunately, making a print that looks like your monitor is no more likely than shooting a image and making that appear like you saw on your monitor. You need to do things to make your print come out right. Thankfully, theres hope.