Preface: The Color Management Conundrum
If you’ve picked up this book because you simply want us to tell you which buttons to push when you run into this or that application’s color management features, put it down again. Although this book starts from the point of view of a beginner in color and color management, and builds up from there, we don’t think a cookbook or color management book for dummies could do the topic justice—this isn’t that book.
However, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist (or any other kind) to benefit from this book. What we’ve learned about color management we’ve learned the hard way—by using it, making a lot of mistakes, correcting those mistakes, and using it some more. This is a book for color management users, not for color scientists, and we guarantee that it’s completely equation-free.
The reasons we won’t just tell you which buttons to push are
• The answers depend on which buttons you’ve already pushed and what you’re trying to achieve.
• Application vendors have a distressing propensity for moving or renaming the buttons.
• Sometimes, a button will do different things in different situations.
• The biggest reason of all—even if we told you which button to push, you wouldn’t know what it did or why you were pushing it.
Instead, we’ve aimed for something a little more ambitious, but we hope a great deal more useful. In this book, we’ve attempted to give you the vocabulary, knowledge, and insight to see beyond the buttons and understand what they do, even if you’ve never seen these particular buttons before. In terms of the old saw about teaching a man to fish instead of giving a man a fish, we’re trying to make you marine biologists!
Why Did We Do This?
We wrote this book for a lot of reasons, some better than others. The biggest one is that hardly a day goes by without at least one of us receiving an email asking if there’s a good resource for learning about color management. Well of course there are, but they’re almost invariably written by color scientists for color scientists—and while they’re both fascinating and indispensable, they tend to be long on equations and theory, and short on practical advice on how to actually use color management tools in production scenarios.
Then there’s the other type of color management resource—the happy marketingspeak that promises to make your printer match your monitor. We wish the people who write these would turn their attention to developing an antigravity drive instead—if they can violate the laws of physics so blithely, they may as well use that ability to produce something that everyone can use!
For those of us who have to use color management to produce real work, both the aforementioned types of resources are useful in the same way (as Chris would say) that a bicycle is useful when you have to get from San Francisco to Portland. Hence the need for this book. We’ve tried to pack in everything we’ve learned in the close to three decades that we’ve collectively spent laboring in the vineyards of color management, including, especially, all the things the manuals don’t tell you.
Understanding the Big Picture
If you don’t understand the Big Picture, the basic underpinnings of color management, it may seem like magic when it works, and like black magic when it doesn’t. It isn’t magic, of course—it’s just some rather clever technology based on some very solid, but limited, science. Human vision is a wondrously complex phenomenon, and a great deal remains to be learned before we can fully explain it.
If you understand the way the technology works, and the scope of the mathematical models on which it’s based, you’ll have a much easier time making color management work for you, and troubleshooting it when it fails to do so.
Sweating the Details
One of the keys to successful color management—one that the manuals largely ignore—is paying close attention to the myriad factors that influence both the behavior of the various hunks of machinery we use to reproduce color, and the way we perceive that color. Our scanners, digital cameras, monitors, printers, and presses are all physical devices, and hence they’re subject to physical influences—heat, humidity, and friction to name but a few—that change the color they produce, and our perception of that color is strongly influenced by the environment in which we view it.
So sweating the details—keeping track of the way your various devices behave, correcting that behavior when necessary, and controlling the environment in which we judge that behavior—is an essential but largely undocumented part of the color management process. Color management succeeds or fails according to the accuracy with which we can describe the way our color-reproduction devices behave, but if that behavior isn’t stable and repeatable, attempting to describe it is like measuring a moving target with a rubber ruler—you probably won’t get the same answer twice in a row.
Making It Flow
Color management doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Useful, real-world color management is simply a part, albeit a useful and important part, of an entire workflow. But the people who publish the software simply document how their particular piece of the puzzle works, not how it fits into the bigger picture.
Everyone’s workflow is to some extent unique, so rather than just laying out a color management workflow, we’ve tried to show you how to analyze color management so that you can integrate it into your own workflow as seamlessly as possible, and even refine that workflow to make it more efficient.
Why Did We Think We Could Do This?
It seemed simple when we first conceived the idea. All three of us are premature adopters of color management, with the scars to match, but we’ve all made color management work in mission-critical scenarios. Needless to say, we grievously underestimated the amount of work this book would entail, and the time it would take us to complete that work—for those of you who have watched the publication date slip ever-further into the future, the wait is over.
Writing this book forced us to learn things we thought we already knew, and turned up masses of material that fell into the category Fred likes to refer to as “more interesting than relevant.” We’ve tried to limit the contents of the book to the material that’s both interesting and relevant—we’ll save the rest for the Color Geek Trivia—Millennium Edition board game. We may have been arrogant when we started out, but we all three are now intimately acquainted with the meaning of the word “hubris.”
How the Book Is Organized
Color management is an immensely deep subject—Bruce calls it a bottomless pit—with tendrils stretching into many different areas ranging from the physics and chemistry of our devices, to the behavior of our software and computer systems, to the neurophysics and psychophysics of our perceptual systems, to psychology, and even to language. So we’ve tried to break it down into manageable categories, and present them in a logical order.
Part I: Introduction to Color Management
In the first four chapters, we try to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. We put this information first because it’s hard to manage color if you don’t know what it is, or how your various software and hardware tools represent and reproduce it.
• What Is Color?
• Computers and Color
• Color Management
• All About Profiles
Part II: Building and Tuning Profiles
Color management succeeds or fails on the accuracy of the profiles we use to describe the way all our color-reproduction devices behave, so the next five chapters look at tried-and-tested real-world techniques for creating, evaluating, tuning and maintaining device profiles.
• Measurement, Calibration, and Process Control
• Building Display Profiles
• Building Input Profiles
• Building Output Profiles
• Evaluating and Editing Profiles
Part III: Applications and Workflow
Color management is only useful if you can integrate it into a working production system, so the final nine chapters look at color management workflow, first from an analytical standpoint, then in terms of the actual tools offered by key applications, and finally as a nuts-and-bolts series of decisions you need to make in order to produce a functioning color management workflow that suits your needs.
• Color management Workflow
• Color Management in the Operating System
• The Adobe Common Color Architecture
• Color Management in Macromedia FreeHand 10 and 11
• Color Management in CorelDRAW 10
• Color Management in QuarkXPress
• Color Management and PDF
• Automation and Scripting
• Building Color Managed Workflows
Part IV: Appendices
This section contains supplementary material that we hope you’ll find both interesting and relevant.
• Profile Anatomy
• Workflow Templates
• Glossary
Thank You!
We couldn’t have produced this book without the help of many individuals we’d like to thank here. We owe a huge vote of thanks to the Dream Team at Peachpit Press—Rebecca Gulick, editor extraordinaire, who knew exactly when to bug us about deadlines and when to refrain from doing so, and Lisa Brazieal, our ace production coordinator, who made sure our digital files were faithfully translated to ink on paper—we’d like to thank them and all our other friends at Peachpit. Emily Glossbrenner produced the index in record time, and delivered it exactly when she’d promised. And special thanks to Liz Welch for catching all those typos and inconsistencies at the 11th hour—any that remain are entirely our fault.
We owe a debt to our peers and colleagues in the industry, but we’d particularly like to thank Michael Kieran and Don Hutcheson for their constant encouragement and generosity of spirit—both slogged their way through early drafts and provided many helpful suggestions.
Several vendors were generous in providing equipment, support, advice, and encouragement. Special thanks go to Brian Levey at ColorVision; Nick Milley and Tom Lianza at Sequel Imaging; Thomas Kunz, Brian Ashe, Liz Quinlisk, and Roland Campo at GretagMacbeth; Bonnie Fladung and Marc Levine at Monaco Systems, Inc.; John Zimmerer at Apple Computer, Inc.; Steve Upton at www.chromix.com; Thomas Knoll and Chris Cox at Adobe Systems, Inc.; Chris Heinz at Eastman Kodak; Mark Duhaime at Imacon USA; Eric Magnusson at Left Dakota, Inc.; John Panozzo at Color-byte Software; Mark Geeves at BESTColor; Dan Caldwell and Bob Burnett at Integrated Color Solutions; and Parker Plaisted and Eddie Murphy at Epson America.
Bruce
“Thanks to all my fellow color geeks, especially Andrew Rodney (the Digital Dog), Bruce Lindbloom, and Ian Lyons, all of whom share their knowledge and expertise selflessly; the Pixel Mafia, for keeping me in line and in wine; Mike Ornellas for making me appear relatively sane; Mike 064 Freeman and Wendy Bauer for playing music with me for the last 20 years without undue complaints; to all the good folks on the ColorSync User’s List; and most of all to Angela, for her patience, wisdom, strength, and love.”
Chris
“For at least cushioning the fall to insanity, if not preventing it entirely, I thank Jay Nelson, Ben Willmore, and Eric Magnusson for their patience and advice. A special thank you to John Zimmerer, Kevin De-Palmer, and Michael Kieran who actually got me started on this path; to Mike Rodriguez and Martin Bailey for providing their knowledge of standards, prepress workflow, and PDF; to Nathan Wade for automation and scripting insights; and to Andrew Rodney for being so gracious with his knowledge, ongoing encouragement, and attempts to teach me ‘Oh come on, just keep it!’ And lastly to His Most Imperial Highness, who saw the beginning of this project but not the end, and the Orthutangans—ik mar beyvoo d’rin!”
Fred
“My thanks can start nowhere but with Dr. Ed Granger, my color mentor; Larry Baca, Rob Cook, Michael Solomon and everyone at Light Source; the good folks I worked with at X-Rite; Thad McIlroy and The Color Resource; Ty Roberts, Mickey Mantle, and all my friends at Gracenote and Pixar. On a personal level, my gratitude to those who have known and encouraged me throughout this effort, and somehow still like me: Alyson Gill, who makes it so I don’t ever have to worry about Emily; Eric Cave, advisor on things academic and co-producer with Alyson of the colorful Meghan; Paul and Alex, my supporting siblings and their families; Ann and Charlie Bradford at the Island House; Lynn Harrington, my first color student; my Nobody Famous mates; and my students and colleagues at CCSF. But most of all, I have to thank my father Frederick Bunting for his great strength and wisdom, but also for exposing me to the incredible beauty that is good engineering.”
Contacts and Resources
We welcome email saying nice or not-so-nice things about this book. You can reach us at [email protected]. And as we’re made aware of the inevitable errata, we’ll post updates, and some useful resources, at www.colorremedies.com/realworldcolor/.