WorkshopThe Tony Hayton Column Tony Hayton Colour Management
As the name suggests, in this month’s column Tony advises on colour management and how to get the best out of your monitor, scanner, printer and the like!
Tony Hayton
ColorMunki during screen profi ling
CoorMunki during printer profi le creation
devices. This is invariably supported by the use of ICC [International Color Consortium] profiles. These profiles are used to adjust the colour for each device [similar to the way glasses can correct a person’s vision]; these profiles ideally need to be created for the device that you own. Printers ideally need to have a profile generated for each paper you print onto and each resolution you print at. The reason being that each paper will have a different colour reproduction and will impact on the colour that you see. Further, any resolution change will also impact the colour, as there will be a different amount of ink laid onto the paper. Years ago when large format printers
ColorMunki I 38
Colour management a few years ago was something that was deemed as a dark art that only a select few could deal with. These days it is still seen as a dark art, however colour management has changed, the tools available have also become much more advanced and have begun to make this “witchcraft” a much simpler piece of the puzzle. These days colour management tools can be purchased for specific devices like screens or printers, or they can be a single tool that will deal with multiple devices. With the equipment available these
was sat thinking, “What should I write about for this piece?” Then I received a call from a customer wanting to have a chat about colour management. So I thought, given the last piece was regarding
large format printing for the Fine Art and Photographic markets, and colour management is a key piece of the puzzle, colour management should be the given subject.
days colour management for large format printers has become much more simple, and something that any owner can do. There are still scenarios where true colour experts should be called in, for example, contract proofing or RIP solutions. When we talk about colour management
we are talking about how each device [monitor, printer, scanner etc] deals with colour. The idea is to allow us to get a consistent colour result across different
could only be driven by RIP software, the colour management was a much more complex process. You would have to limit each ink colour, limit the combined ink levels [eg. CMYK could be used to make deeper blacks], and you would also have to linearise the printer. Each of these steps would take time, [waiting for the print and for the inks to dry], paper and ink. If you think that you would have to carry out each process for every paper you use, this could take a very long time. On average, depending on print speeds and how precise you wanted to be, this could take you around 4 to 5 hours, this is without even creating the ICC profile, this is just to get you ready. To create the profile you would then have to print out the colour patches [a collection of block colours in a colour chart, a bit like a paint chart], and you would again have to wait for inks to dry and take readings for each of these patches. So as you can see this was a very long process. Granted, print speeds have increased drastically, but depending on your setup and the printer you have, this could still be a process that you have to use. However times change, improvements are made and the world of large format printers is no exception to this. Large format printers started to be released and were given printer drivers, [a way that you could print to the printer from the applications that you use] so that you could even print to a large format printer from Microsoft Word for example. With this new development profiling
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