Seldom-discussed, color-management choices can affect your digital prints.
Amazing. It’s truly amazing to watch a guy teach high-tech, color-management practices for eight hours and not see him refer to a book or note page, or even to review a fact or two. Not once. But, that’s what Phil Nelson did during X-Rite’s excellent, day-long Picture Perfect Color seminar, held in Cincinnati on July 24.
Phil knows his stuff. His graphic-arts career began in the pre-Mac era of paste-ups and mechanicals, but, during the founding era of computer graphics, he shifted his attention to video animation and produced commercials for ad agencies, HBO and Cinemax. He soon moved to Apple Computers (Cupertino, CA) and, after 10 years, to Adobe Systems Inc. (San Jose, CA), where he promoted its applications to web designers. Seven years after that, he formed Phil Nelson Imaging, a Stamford, CT-based digital-photography agency.
About then, he also began teaching for the Graphics Intelligence Agency (GIA), now X-Rite Color Services (Grand Rapids, MI), and wrote The Photographer’s Guide to Color Management.
In Cincinnati, Phil taught color management and profiles. In the process, he discussed software tools you may have missed or, at least, not thought about carefully. Rendering intents, for example. A selected rendering intent tells the software what to do with out-of-gamut colors, and your rendering-intent choice can affect your output colors.
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXPress and some RIPs let you select rendering intents when performing International Color Consortium (ICC) profile conversions. You may also find different names for rendering intent in these softwares: “intent” or “image intent.” I’ve seen it as “graphic intent” in Illustrator.
Profiles
An ICC profile is a look-up table (LUT) file, that is, a color map that defines color space properties. Profiles also dictate how a particular device reproduces color on a particular media. Profiles that accurately characterize a particular device – monitor, scanner, digital camera or printer – give you the best color-managed workflow, if, of course, all are calibrated.
Color management requires books to explain. Thus, my discussion here can’t begin to cover the details. Briefly, gamut describes the colors a device can capture, display or output.
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