Color Management

I've never liked the whole color management thing in regards to digital imaging. Although from a theoretical standpoint it makes sense; profiling all your gear to get consistent color and whatnot, but in practice it is mostly a huge pain in the ass. The cynic in me thinks that this entire color management thing is simply a scheme cooked up to make money and make people think they're doing something useful when you're really just jerking the computer off. My experience with color management has been that you mess around for hours and in the end you get color that is like 5% better\different than what you had to start with. Case in point, those suction cup monitor things. We bought two new Apple Cinema Displays for our designers and of course had to get the calibration doodads. So I ran the software, went through all the rigamarole and in the end you can compare your monitor new fancy pants profile with the bone stock settings. THERE AIN'T MUCH DIFFERENCE! Oh boy, so it's a little less red than before. Whoop de doo. Yeah, THAT was worth 300 bucks...it's a joke.

I do admire the extremely technical-minded people who can grasp all the scientific stuff involved, but when you just want to git 'r done, cripes what a waste of time! When I worked for a commerical printer doing scanning\color correction\retouching we didn't screw around with color management, we just used a little utility by Thomas Knoll called Adobe Gamma. Tweaked it so our greys were as neutral as possible on our monitors and had decent contrast and we were off. There are perfectly good reasons for using measurement tools, but when you're dealing with an inherently subjective medium like photography I think there's a lot of leeway for the "well it looks right" approach.

The other thing to consider is that no matter how accurate and precise your spectrophotmeter or colorimeter is, your klunky 'ol analog eyeball\brain system is correcting for color shifts anyway. It is SO damn relative! You can work at a CRT monitor for a few hours tweaking a photo and think you've got the most brilliant image with blazing hot highlights, but then you look over to the lightbox with the original transparency and think, "Fuck! It's ten times brighter!" I am a big fan of CRTs, but put a Cinema Display side by side with one and the CRT looks dull and dim. But you can still do great work with either format. Your brain gets used to the "flaws" of either system.

Perhaps I am just jealous of those who are imminently technically-minded and completely grok the whole color management process? I think part of it has to do with the fact that running all these calibration procedures is not usually something one needs to do on a daily basis. It seems to be a fairly involved process that is easily forgotten from disuse. When our Epson 9800 began drifting at work I was in a real funk because I couldn't remember or make sense of the steps necessary to generate profiles. I honestly don't know if the software is poorly designed or I am not smart enough for it. It could go either way. I wonder if the same could be said of Photoshop? I hope not. I hope it's poorly designed. Heh!

In many ways the whole printing process is poorly designed. I can accept that there are numerous parameters to control, I can accept that it is complicated, I can accept that not every user needs to understand every parameter which is adjustable. However, I cannot accept the interface. By that I mean there are far too many screens involved. I honestly think there could and should be a SINGLE screen\dialog box for printing. I must give credit to Adobe, their dialogs for Acrobat and Illustrator come very close. Anyway, that's beyond the scope of color management and I couldn't possibly add more words to the title.