MPI305

Final Thoughts November 5, 2006

When I decided to do Colour Management as my topic I honestly didn’t know that it would be such a big topic. There are so many areas that I haven’t covered, however I tried to post up the areas that I thought were of greater importance in understanding the principle of colour management (remembering that I didn’t know what colour management was) and the areas that I thought I could perhaps implement in my own workflow.

It became pretty apparent from the start that most of the thing that I was reading about on how to solve my printing problems (i.e., profiling printers, cameras, scanners etc) I would not be able to test due to cost and lack of equipment. After plowing through endless piles of research i did manage to come across things that i could implement.

These things were:

• How to calibrate and profile my monitor using Adobe Gamma
• Understanding and selecting the correct workflow for the job
• How to soft proof and use adobes gamut warning to identify problematic colours
• understanding which colour space to use for a specific pourpose
• Colour constancy and how to use this principle to get better results from my digital stills

At the beginning of this research topic i wanted to “determine the right recipe for the perfect print” and have i achieved this? Well the answer is no. What i really wanted was a what you see is what you get result, and that is impossible because there are allways going to be some colours that your monitor can display that cannont be reproduced by ink and vise versa. So i was really setting myself up for failure. At the end of the day all I could really do was to educate myself so that I can identify the problems that can occur and learn how to manage them better.