Managing Color.

Color. It is a wonderful thing.

Long time no post [again]! The short update is that not much is new and notable in my life. That isn’t a bad thing, just a ‘things-are-proceeding-as-they-usually-do’ thing. Yesterday, though, I did something small for myself that made some things much better in my life. Of course this, as all of my last posts, relates to photography… I bought a colorimeter! and calibrated all of the displays in my home.

Ah, the feel of consistency! It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing!!! I can’t emphasize how important this is… The problem was that I have a multi-display setup (an Apple MBP, a Sony 20″ LCD, and a Sharp 46″ LCD), and my displays were not displaying the same colors when content was dragged between them. This presented extreme challenges. Which display would you trust given three reasonably high quality products? I tried and tried to calibrate the three using the built in color management in OS X 10.4.10, however, was unable to make them appear truly consistent. After reading about color management / calibration online (here’s an excellent article at Rob Galbraith’s site), and after avoiding the issue for a long [long] time, I figured it was time to break down and truly address the issue. I bought an eye-display 2. There are more elaborate setups (see that site, wow), but I decided to start with the basics — ensuring that my monitors were consistent with each other, with presumably what everyone else should see, and with what things should look like if printed. The good news was that the MBP was not far off, but it is an immense relief to know that all are the same now and that I can use any display to process my photographs.

It is worth noting that there was a purported class-action lawsuit against the MB and MBP for color display. Information on that can be found here. My feelings are that this is interesting, but that once calibrated the display is still pretty (really) good, even if the millions illusion is due to dithering.

If you are in the design or digital photography world, color calibration is something that I think really needs to be done sooner rather than later. I waited, and it wasn’t worth it. Feel free to email me with any questions about my experience.