In addition to Leo's older Monitor, Calibration, and LCD List, there are a number of other great threads on the topic, as well as some highly informative web pages discussing these issues. This thread lists some of those threads and pages, and also has some inline content about dealing with color.

Contents

MM Threads on Color Management, Calibration, and Colorspaces
Non-MM Articles on Calibration and Color Issues
Some Color Calibration Hardware Examples
An Overview of Color Profiles and Calibration
Custom Print Profiles
Basic Troubleshooting of 'bad color'
Color on the Web: why do my images look different?

Why Bother With Hardware Calibration At All?

Because our eyes adapt, making them excellent tools in Real Life, but poor references for absolute values.

See below for a trivial example. (The greenish dots are the same color, and the gray dots are the same brightness.)



Here’s another one. Are the gray spots the same color and brightness?



The only thing changing is the background saturation; the spots remain constant.

MM Threads on Color Management, Calibration, and Colorspaces

Colorspaces and Printing profiles? (Stephen Eastwood on sRGB vs Adobe RGB vs ProPhoto RGB, and getting prints to match the screen.)
Adobe RGB color space vs. sRGB default setting?
color spaces, calibration, and profiles... (Printing, web, and other peoples’ monitors)
Calibration (Good general thread about profiles)
Color Calibration devices...... (Best and cheapest? Also notes about multi-monitor setups)
sRGB or adobeRGB (Why to use which profile)
ICC Profiles (Setting up for printing at Costco and other labs)
Calibrate Monitor or rely on sRGB
Best Color Temperature on a monitor
Monitor calibration

Non-MM Articles on Calibration and Color Issues

From Color Manglement to Color Management from EarthBound Light. Quick overview with good links.
Klaus Bjarner’s excellent eBook on Color Management
Read this or the Digital PhotoPro guide first
Digital PhotoPro Magazine’s excellent Mysteries of (Color) Space article (Overview from pre-camera to printing, including terms, recommendations, etc.)
Photo.net’s Color Management articles (quite good)
DryCreekPhoto.com Overview of Color Management (Another great starting point)
Pixsylated’s Why your photos look lousy…or simple truths about color management
Why don't my prints match my screen from Northlight-Images
Luminous Landscape on ProPhoto RGB (Different working spaces)
DryCreekPhoto.com Calibration Product Review (dated 2005, but worth reading nevertheless)
Northlight-images Calibration reviews (Current as of 9/2009)

If you prefer videos, there's a nice one on color management from X-Rite. It's around an hour.

Some Color Calibration Hardware Notes from Leo Lam (lll)

lll wrote:
- Eye-One Display 2
- Eye-One Display 2

- Eye-One Display LT


There is no "cheapest and best".  The best wouldn't be the cheapest, and the cheapest can't be the "best".

The LT would be the lowest I would ever go.  The Huey is, like CBush said, kinda pregnant.

Some Color Calibration Hardware Notes from Kevin Connery

Kevin Connery wrote:

X-Rite and Datacolor (formerly ColorVision) are now the major players in the calibration market, with Monaco Systems and Gretag-Macbeth’s systems having merged into X-Rite’s offerings.

For display-only solutions, there’s only a handful of products out there:
i1 Display 2 (around $250)
i1 Display LT (around $150)
Spyder3Pro (around $175)
Spyder3Elite (around $250, same hardware as the Pro, but more options in the software)
Spyder2express (their entry-level package).

Any of these will do a competent job; relatively recent older units like the i1Display, Spyder2, and Monaco Optix XR are also decent performers, and can often be found at a lower, close-out price.

Northlight-images has some great reviews of many of these packages.

Printer calibration devices tend to be more expensive—starting at around $750 and going up to over $4000. X-Rite’s new ColorMunki Photo, at around $500 is the only unit under $750 I know of, but it’s been getting rave reviews. (I haven’t used one.)

At those prices, most photographers are better served by outsourcing their profiling unless they do a lot of printing on a lot of different substrates. (See the Custom Print Profiles section later in this thread.)

Overview by Klaus Bjarner Photo

Aussie Guevara wrote:
I've always used default LCD setting on my MacBook display and never touched the color profiles. His agent sent photographs back to us claiming that she was seeing primarily green.

Klaus Bjarner Photo wrote:
First off, an notebook LCD is not suitable for image editing. This is due to, that a notebook LCD is running 6bit colors, and there off it can produce 262.144 different colors. A regular LCD monitor is running 8bit colors, which gives it 16.777.216 colors. This is 64 times more, and makes quite a difference. The best you can do, is to attach an external monitor to the notebook when editing the images. Your macbook can take up to a 23" external display using the Apple mini dvi to dvi adapter.

Second, if you and the agent have never color calibrated your montors, none of you can know, who is seeing the right colors in the image image. Every monitor produces is different. You can take two monitors, same brand, same model, straight out of the box, and they will display colors differently. What you do with color calibration is eliminating the margin of errors.

A product like the datacolor Spyder3Pro will in 3-4 minutes do a complete calibration of your monitors (even handles multi screen setups, if your buy an external monitor, and measures the ambient light for the calibration). The software generates an ICC prodile, which simplified, is a file that tells your computers operating system (Mac OS X), which colors your display was asked to display, and which color the spyder3 actually measured it displayed. With that information for a large numbers of readings your operaing system knows exactly, how your monitors displays colors, and where it has color casts. With that knodledge the operating systems adjusts for these errors, and what you see on your monitors is real consistent colors. So if you think the image looks to green, then it is actually because the real image data in the file is to green, and not just because your monitor has a green cast.

As a added benefit you will experience, that the image quality of your monitor will increase dramatically after having been calibrated. Even with a product like the macbook, the effect is dramatically. Since a monitor changes over time, due to the backlight changing, you will repeat the calibration process every 2 weeks to have a perfectly calibrated monitor. All photographers do this, just as naturally as clening your lens and CMOS for optimum image quality.

You can find the ICC profile for your monitor, if you go into system preferences, display, chose the color tab, and here you have different ICC profiles for you monitor. Try changing the profile and see the effect. When you have profiled your monitor a custom profile will be put here, that is a perfect match for your screen only. Like having a custom made suit or dress.

Aussie Guevara wrote:
Now that I realize it, he has had me working his photographs in 16 bit and color profile ProPhoto. His camera shoots in Adobe RGB.... I've always worked in that color space and in 8 bit, 16 bit when I'm working with something extremely crazy....I look at his monitor the other day and its set to ProPhoto as well. And so is Raw.

He must be crazy, yes? I don't ask questions with what he wants me to work in, but I do know that ProPhoto has colors that most printers just can't reproduce. What do you think?

Klaus Bjarner Photo wrote:
The color space is just a representation of the amount of colors that can be held. Like a CD-rom that can hold 700Mb of data and a DVD that holds 4300Mb of data. Just the same with color spaces. sRGB is the smallest and mostly used for images intended for the web and monitor only, AdobeRGB is bigger and usually used for print and ProPhoto is the newest and largest and what I recommend using in most cases. The "problem" with ProPhoto is, that it is so large, that the entire color space can't be reproduced on a monitor or printer. The advantage of working and doing your editing in ProPhoto is, that when you changes colors  you wont have any clipping, because you have so many colors to chose from. Just in the final stage you convert the color profile to sRGB or Adobe RGB depending on your output, if you are sending the file off.  There is a lot more to it, that would be to long a tale, to go into in this thread, but I guess you get the idea.

Then what about the bit depth. Since the computer is working in 8bit colors, when it produces a specific color it is out of a combination of red, green and blue (RGB). For each channel it has 8bit (which is why the colors are often referred to as 24bit - 3x8=24). That gives it 2^8=256 colors in each channel.

That might be fine when working in sRGB colorspace, but when you work in a much larger colorspace like the ProPhoto (which you should), you still have only 256 shades of the red channel, even though the channel is now much bigger, so the steps between each shades becomes bigger and more noticeable. Imagine you had a muffin and devided it into 256 pieces, that would give very small and precise pieces, where you easily could serve the amount a person wanted. Now imagine a giant wedding cake, that you also should devide into 256 pieces. Much larger pieces and not as easy to serve the guests just the amount they wanted, since the pieces are much bigger. The same it is with colors. When working 8bit in a large colorspace the jump from each of the 256 shades is bigger, and thus less precise when doing color correction.

That is why we use 16bit. With 16bit you have 2^16=65536 colors in each of the three channels instead of just 256. When you look at the combined numbers of colors the diffrerence is mind blowing. 8bit gives 16,7 billion colors, where 16 bit gives you 2,81E14 or 16,7 billion times more colors. So when you do you color correction it is with a much larger precision.

Ok a lot of numbers, bottom line. Working in ProPhoto is good, and always work in 16 bit when editing. If you have limited amount of space, convert to 8bit just before saving the file, which will reduce the file size to half.

What then about RAW, you said all images was recorded in RAW, which is the right thing to do. When shooting RAW you have every information the sensor captures in the file. You can convert it to any color space you like upon importing to you computer. So if your camera in the menu sais sRGB or AdobeRGB means nothing when you shooting RAW, it only affects when shooting jpeg.

Most cameras (like the Canon EOS 5D) shoots in 12bit when shooting RAW, so you can see why it is important to use 16bit instead of 8bit, because using 8bit, you would have thrown a lot of colors away already on import. Using ProPhoto and 16bit you preserve as many as possible of the captured colors.

So bottom line for best quality:
1. calibrate your monitor, so you know, that what you see is correct.
2. shoot in RAW for optimal capture quality
3. Import and edit in ProPhoto colorspace using 16bit for optimum quality
4. When finished you can convert to other prodiles and bit depths based upon the use of the file.
5. make sure the agent calibrates his/her monitor as well

If you are interested in knowing more, I have a small 6 pages free e-book on my homepage, that describes it a little bit better. You are wellcome to download it from http://www.klausbjarner.com - so is everybody of cause. :-)

I would also like to point out, that I am assiciated with datacolor in Scandinavia, so my advise towards calibration devises is biased. :-) There are a few other companies, that also produces great calibration tools, like X-Rite, but in my oppinion the Spyder3 is better, and as far as I know also cheaper. If money is limited go for the spyder2Express. Same level of calibration quality, but with a limited number of settings to adjust compared to the new Spyder3.

Hope I answered your question, and to all the color geeks. I know I jumped over the fence on some of the explanations, but this is done to not make the subject more complicated than it has to be. :-)

--Klaus

Custom Print Profiles

Kevin Connery wrote:
A custom profile is essential for many brands or models of printers; the manufacturer's profiles are (presuming no flaws) based on a "generic" version of the printer, and unit-to-unit variation can be significant enough to make a visible difference. Some of the newer printers have very low variation, and the stock profiles are sufficient for the papers for which profiles are available. Others--even some new models--need custom profiles to achieve good results.

A custom profile will improve the potential consistency/accuracy for almost any printer, but unless the room lighting for the display is sufficiently consistent, and the colors of the room/environment where the display is used are very neutral, the differences between a stock profile and a custom one may be very small. (As noted, it's printer-dependent.)

RGB-based print profiles range from around $35 to $200 (CathysProfiles.com is $40; BookSmartStudios.com runs $18-$70; DryCreekPhoto.com's profile run $50; Andrew Rodney charges $100; etc), while CMYK or RIP profiles range from free (from some RIP vendors) to $500 or more.

Depending (again!) on the printer, a custom edited profile may help some aspects--linearization or black-and-white neutrality being common ones--but profile editing is as much an art as a science today, and that's usually much more expensive, for a very small improvement.

Software and a decent spectrophotometer for printer profiling currently costs around $1000. (Monaco's Pulse [very good], Gretag-Macbeth's iOne Photo [very good] are both between $1000-$1500.) Scanner-based print profiling products aren't, in my opinion, worth spending time or money on. (I've bought 2, alas, and used a few others.) The only sub-$750 spectrophotometer kit today is X-Rite’s new ColorMunki Photo; it's been getting good reviews, but is quite new.

”Sanity Check”  -- Basic Troubleshooting

Before spending more money on new hardware or software, or even changing lots of settings, make a test print with known values and use that to isolate where the problem is.

Is it the Display?

Create a new Photoshop document, and draw a black to white gradient to fill the document (D to set default colors, G for gradient tool, and be sure to set it at 100% opacity, no dither, normal mode, and linear gradient). A 4x6 print would be sufficient--set it up as the lab wants it.

Select the top half, and posterize that to 8-10 bands. (Filter>Posterize).

If it looks neutral on screen, the problem is probably not with your display and/or screen profile. If it looks OK, send it to the lab (or printer) after running through your normal process. If it doesn't come out very close to neutral, the problem is either with your lab or your normal process.

A Photoshop Action to create this image can be found here; a 1200x1600 pixel TIFF file of the result can be downloaded here. I make a new one each time because it’s faster than finding the old one…

Is it the Printer?

If you’ve sent the above file, or a similar one with known neutral tones to the printer and the colors are still off, it could be due to a number of reasons.

1: Out of one color of ink on an inkjet printer
2: Clogged heads on an inkjet printer
3: The wrong printer profile was specified
4: Color management wasn’t specified exactly one time.

The first three are easy to check. The last is trickier.  If, for example, you have Photoshop do the color management for printing, and also tell the print driver and/or RIP to do so, you’ll end up overcompensating, which is just as bad as not doing any at all.

Typically, on a directly-attached printer, having Photoshop do the color management is best. In that case, make sure that the printer is NOT doing color management (Epson calls it ‘No Color Adjustment’; different vendors have similar options.) The controls for that are usually buried in the Properties tab for the printer on Windows, or in the Color Management tab for the printer on Mac OS X.

When sending a file to an outside source, check with the lab or printer to see how they want their file. Usually that will be as an sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998) RGB file, but check first. If the file isn’t in the form they want, convert a copy to the profile they recommend, and send them that copy. When sending to non-professional labs, if you’re doing your own color-correction, be sure to let the lab know not to make further adjustments; automatic ‘corrections’ are often made by the machines if it’s not disabled, and this can cause problems.

If none of the above isolate the problem, it’s not a Basic Troubleshooting issue.

Color on the Web

Why do my images look different in some applications than they do in Photoshop or Lightroom?

Photoshop and Lightroom are  colorspace aware; it recognizes color profiles (descriptions of what the numbers should look like), and displays the image according to that profile.

Many current (2010) browsers* do NOT pay any attention to color profiles.

To make it so that most viewers will see things close to how you do, you will want to convert your image to the sRGB colorspace before saving it for the web.

In Photoshop 7 and later (CS, CS2, CS3…):
Edit > Convert to Profile… [Note: NOT ‘Assign Profile’]
Select sRGB (or sRGB IEC61966-2.1 or some other sRGB variant).
Older version of Photoshop have it under the Image menu.

Generally, this should be done to a copy of the file, to avoid unnecessary changes to the original. Follow-up with your usual web-preparation—resizing, sharpening, etc., then save it.

This doesn't mean everyone will see it the same way, as most viewers will not have their systems calibrated, but it'€™s your best available choice now.

* Color-aware browsers include Safari 3+, Firefox 3.5+ (but turned off by default in v3.x ), Google Chrome 12+ on Mac, and the antique IE 5.2 (on Mac only, and only if the Use Colorsync option is selected).

Safari 2.x and earlier, IE 8 and earlier (IE9 is a little better, but not there yet), Firefox 2.x and earlier, Opera 10.6 and earlier, Camino 2.0 and earlier,  Google Chrome on Mac before 12.x, and Chrome 12 on Windows at least as late as v12.x are NOT color managed, or have it disabled by default..

You can test your browser at the Color.org test page.

A very brief test is shown below: 3 images which will look nearly identical in a colormanaged browser, and quite different in an unmanaged one.



One dramatic test. If the colors listed in the squares are not correct, your browser is not color managed.



If your browser isn't color managed, the square labeled Green will appear red, the one labeled Blue will appear green, and the one labeled Red will appear blue. All the other colors will be wrong as well.

Another test, to see if both v2 and v4 ICC profiles are accepted. If all 4 of the below sets look at least roughly the same, both are supported.
   

   

(This is how those patches look in Opera 9.5, Safari 4.0, and Firefox 3.0 [with color management turned on])