Color Management is for everyone.
One of the most commonly asked questions in digital photography is "why don't my prints look like the photo on the screen?" I admit, I asked myself this very question several years ago when I dropped $500 on a wide-format printer. Who hasn't spent hours printing and re-printing, trying to get their printed photo to look like the photo on the screen. Countless sheets of paper and ink cartridges later, I figured there had to be a better solution. After all, if you just plunked down some serious cash for a DSLR, don't you want to make prints that look correct?
The answer, it turns out, lies in something called color calibration. Basically, your computer sends a stream of numerical data to your monitor, and your monitor does what it's told to do. But while your computer may have sent a numerical value that indicates "yellowish green" to it, your monitor's LCD or phosphors may not display that color properly. It might be bluish. Or reddish. Who knows? The problem is, only YOU can see and interpret what colors come out of your monitor. The computer doesn't know if something isn't "right". The exact same rules apply to your printer. Your computer sends numerical data to the printer—"red", but the printer converts the RGB numbers into CMYK data and prints on a piece of paper. Not only can the color output of the inks vary, but depending on the lighting in the room and the type of paper (some papers are yellowish, others bluish), the color may look different to your eye. How, then, can you tell your printer to print "Red" when you ask it to, and not end up with "greenish red?"
A few years ago, there was a huge uproar when NASA discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope was producing fuzzy images. So they sent a team of astronauts to give the Hubble "eyeglasses". Color management is like giving your computer a pair of eyeglasses so that it "knows" how to modify the RGB numbers so that it can communicate better with your printer and monitor. To do this, you need a piece of hardware called a colorimeter and some color calibration software. Usually, these tools are bundled together in an affordable package.
When you use a colorimeter, you get a tool that actually "sees" what your monitor is displaying when your computer sends a particular RGB number to it. In this manner, a "color profile" for your monitor is constructed. The profile is a set of "corrections" that tells your computer how to make "red" actually look "red" on your screen.
The same scenario holds true for printers. You can use a colorimeter to read color patches printed from a standard file and then create a unique printer profile for a particular inkset and paper type. This is a little more complicated (and expensive) to do at home. The good news is that many printers now include a set of custom profiles for a range of paper types that are installed with the printer driver software.
So, how complicated (and expensive) is this whole color management thing? The answer depends on how meticulous you are about color accuracy. If you are a product photographer and do work for magazines or catalogs, then you probably want to make darn sure that the orange Wheaties box you have photographed actually matches the color of the box when you print the catalog. However, if you are a regular photographer, like me, all you need to do is get "close". You just don't want magenta or green skin tones in your prints. Skies should be blue, but the reproducing the exact shade of blue probably isn't super critical. It's art, after all!
If you do nothing else, calibrate your monitor, and I don't mean by eyeballing it with the RGB adjustments on your screen. Go out and get an inexpensive colorimeter. There are a couple on the market that do an excellent job and are affordable, including Colorvision's Spyder Pro and the Monaco Optix X-Rite. For under $200, you will be able to calibrate your monitor and suddenly things will look a whole lot better. The software walks you right through the calibration process. It's totally easy. Once your monitor is calibrated and profiled, you can use the printer profiles that came with your printer to complete the chain. If you really want to go all-out, you can invest in a printer-calibration system or send out a print sample for a custom profile. Just remember that a printer profile is only good for a particular set of inks in combination with a particular type of paper. There is no "one size fits all" printer profile.
The final step of color management is to make sure you implement everything properly in your workflow. The monitor calibration software will usually do everything for you in terms of applying the profile data to your screen. If you use Photoshop or Capture NX, the next step is to make sure you set your default color space to Adobe RGB 1998. Whatever you do, don't set Photoshop/ NX's default space to your monitor profile! Just set it at Adobe RGB 1998 and leave it alone. This way, the images you save will have a particular set of "color instructions" that other people's computers can read and interpret properly. One side note, if you routinely use images for the web or email, it is better to convert your image to the sRGB space. That's because web browsers and image viewers (other than Photoshop) usually don't read color profiles that are saved in your images. Instead, they just "assume" a color space of sRGB. If you view a file saved as Adobe RGB with a "dumb" viewer, the colors will look dull and undersaturated. However, I still recommend the Adobe RGB space as your default because your prints will look better (there are more colors possible in Adobe RGB 1998 than sRGB).
This is the "Print with preview" dialog in Photoshop CS2. This is how I print using a custom printer profile for my S9000. The image was originally saved in Capture NX, and had the Adobe RGB 1998 profile embedded in it (there is no difference between Adobe RGB 1998 and Nikon Adobe RGB 1998).
Here is the print dialog showing the Color Management tab in Capture NX. Again, I've set the printer profile to use my custom S9000 profile.
When you go to print from Photoshop or Capture NX, you'll get a dialog box. Look for the "Color Management" options. The "source" space is whatever profile was applied to your image. This is the "instruction set" that tells your computer which number to use for green, red, etc. If you saved your file in Photoshop or Capture NX, chances are your image has a profile associated with it already (this is the "include image profile" checkbox that you often see when saving your file in PS or NX). The "destination" profile should be the color profile for your particular printer/paper combination. When you get to your printer's options (before you hit print) make sure you turn off color management in your printer driver! Otherwise, Photoshop/NX will make one set of "corrections" and your printer will try to make its own correction on top of it. Bad idea.
Here is my printer dialog for the S9000. I've chosen the "Color Options" tab (this may vary with printer model) and turned color correction off by selecting "None". I don't want my printer to undo all my color management wizardry!
Resources
Colorvision www.colorvision.com
Monaco Optix www.xritephoto.com
The Photographer's Guide to Capture NX by Jason Odell
