Color Management

Color Management - An easy introduction to consistent true colors in capture - edit - print
By Klaus Bjarner

Printing using a profile

Programs like Word and Excel do not have a clue about what color management is and why should they? They are for printing a letter or calculating a mortgage and not for color critical work or image editing.

You need to use programs for graphical use like Quark, Adobe Photoshop or Adobe InDesign. They all have build in color management systems to take full advantage of your new ICC profiles for both display and print.

How to get the program to use the profiles differs from program to program, but to make an example let's take Adobe Photoshop, that is essential to all photographers.

With Adobe Photoshop CS3, things have gotten a lot easier. Luckily the programmers at Adobe have combined the "print" and "print with preview" modes, so you just have one print dialog box which makes it a whole lot easier for all of us. In the right side of the dialog box all the settings for color management are grouped together. In the top you can switch between output and color management settings.

In the color management settings you must set Photoshop to manage colors instead of the default printer.

In profile you select the custom made profile you have just made for your print/paper combination using the Spyder3Print. The last setting is to choose the rendering intent. This instructs Photoshop how to treat the out of gamut colors in your print file. By selecting the different intents one by one you can see a preview of how they affect your print. Below the drop box you will also see an explanation of what each setting does.

Continue reading: Calibrating other devices »