Colour Management

I have doing some work on the area of colour management. In the past, I have been caught out when creating images that looked ugly when printed or displayed on other monitors, because my editing equipment was poorly adjusted. I have found some useful resources:-

• Northlight Images has some excellent articles about colour management including many product reviews.
• A free windows control panel widget is available.
• Photo.net's Digital Darkroom forum frequently discussed this topic.
• Display calibration dot com, has some useful free tools and test patterns.
  

My own conclusion is that, given the number of images I print versus have printed versus showcase online, monitor calibration is most significant to me. I bought a mid-range Spyder 2 colorimeter from an ebay dealer and put it to work. The software and widget will install on multiple computers, which is nice because I used more than one laptop for photo editing and its good to have some confidence that they are set identically. The actual calibration process was extremely straightforward at took less than 15 minutes per machine, but I had to tweak the colour temperature a bit as the initial settings were a bit too warm for my liking.

The provided software conflicts with Adobe's own colour management tools, Adobe Gamma, which is understandable as they both do the same kind of thing. A lot of advice on the net
is to disable Adobe Gamma from the start menu, but uninstalling elements, recalibrating and then reinstalling appeared to do the trick. On the way, I discovered msconfig, a cool little windows utility which lets you disable all the programs that run at windows start up. Just about every photo editor out there automatically installs a little app. that sits and looks for cameras/cards/storage devices with images. If you find these intrusive or if you have more than one of them, msconfig is a good way of getting rid of them.