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Color Management

hold idea behind color management is that we have color consistency you don't want to be changing your color spaces and basically you want all of your devices looking at this one color the same you know what shifting so if there is a known value this red is a particular rgb it should look that particular gb no matter where you're looking at it in your system whether it's going to be in the print or it's going to be in your monitor or captured by your camera so for color management I'm goingto we're going go more in depth I'll tell you the basics use white balance and have some wayto calibrate your monitor if you don't listen to anything else just have a way to calibrate your monitor for sure and makes you captured accurate white balance in camera and that's a good place to start if you went ahead and you've got all those settings right that I told you in the last segment so that you have the same color spaces in the same bit depths going throughout your workflow that's pretty good so h...

ere's what is calibration essentials you start with calibrating your camera you actually can build camera profiles and do custom calibrations were not going to get into that not something that I do myself but you do need to at minimum calibrate by having a white balance so that's your capture I've captured something that is correct color in the next part is you need to have a calibrated monitor I'm gonna show you a little bit about that and we will bring out a sample program another thing that you could do working with your file to make sure it's being represented accurately is also using a color checker to make sure all of the colors you're correct not just the color cast on dh then taking a look at how it's going to look in your output so let's just get into the monitor parts all right so for monitor how monitor calibration works is if you know red is a certain color you need that color to be represented accurately on your screen so how the calibration calibration systems work is you take a little sensor and you put it on the screen and it flashes of color that it knows its value it already knows what it's supposed to look like and uh in rgb and it flashes through a whole bunch of different swatches and the sensor is reading it and at the end what it does is that makes a makes a profile and so it'll shift the monitor and change the color so that those swatches air being correctly represented so can I have it right yeah it's buried right there perfect okay so this one is the data color spider for all right and so says all it looks like and it is insanely simple I love it all you do is you put it on the back of your monitor you download the software and then you hit run and it will flash a red and it will flash of green flash is all these different colored tones it takes I think takes about five minutes it's very very short and then what it does is it just it makes a profile you don't have to do anything from there it sets that up as you your monitors profile so now all the colors are going to be correct it does let you take a look at old profiles compare the compare what the change was to make sure for some reason something wasn't screwed up here's a couple of things that you want to consider first of all these are not expensive it's one of the few things in photography that's not crazy expensive that will actually make a difference to your images so it's under a couple hundred dollars for most of these systems you when you're calibrating you want to make sure you're in a room without a lot of extraneous ambient light close the window do it at night and turn off the lights basically because you don't want this to be reading color and have it somehow influenced by light in the room you want to run this maybe about once a month that's the recommended standard I certainly have gone longer newer monitors will I have to wear color longer but especially older monitors the longer you go the color starts to shift an older monitors start to shift even further so once a month it's very very simple but it makes a huge difference because now the color that you captured is the color that you're seeing so so here's a couple of things that you might want to look at if you're looking for the brands these air the industry standards I have used all of these right now what I had is the data color spider for that's what I was uh calibrating my monitor on my laptop with x ray also has the color monkey in the eye one display pro the color monkey has a bunch of different products so if you look at it in your eyes glaze over because there's so many different ones really if you're just getting started in the basics of having a calibrated system all you're really looking for is the ability to calibrate your monitor the more advanced system say the eye one display pro lets you calibrate your monitor your printer your camera a scanner a projector and so for most of us that's not necessarily applicable you can even go ahead and create custom profiles for your printer which you called I c c profiles but so you can have a profile for a particular camp a particular printer with a particular type of paper most of us don't do that ourselves so just look for whatever gives you this a couple hundred dollars or less um so let's talk about monitors all right so we're going to calibrate our monitor to get the color to look right but not all monitors are the same in fact there are some really really crappy monitors but if you don't know what you're looking for how do you know what to get the monitor for example in my laptop it's okay with color accuracy but it really doesn't show that much more than s rgb in other words if I'm doing really careful color color adjustments and I'm going to have a large print I don't want to be making adjustments on my laptop when you use that spider calibrate er when you use thes spider pro it actually shows you at the end roughly what color space your monitor is capturing so you can have some of some type of idea if it's a good monitor or not it will actually let you know that this is the problem is like I'm just thinking about me you know I got my five these three thirty five hundred camera I might be shooting with a twenty two hundred dollars lens and then like a two hundred dollar monitor I've got great color here you know decent and then so you may want to invest in a better quality minor but doesn't mean it has to be incredibly expensive I'm going to give you a couple tips for some good monitors on the market right now of course whenever you're looking to do this you might want to do your own research you definitely want an hd monitor you're looking for a monitor the average monitor that advertises color accuracy not a gaming monitor so certain monitors are advertised for people playing videogames computer games whatever it may be and they're often more saturated and have faster refresh times and it's not accurate color it might look great but it's not actually what your image what true colors your images has look for a color range one billion plus is awesome if you can achieve that read that in the specs the higher the bit depth the better the bit depth is the exact same things were looking looking at before some waters have six some have ate some have ten higher the bit death you can get the better and look for something called an I p s monitor it's just gives you more accurate color this is what kind of high end retouch er's would be retouching on just the type of monitor so looking at these these are a couple monitors that have been rated I checked them I took like five or six different sources and these air monitors that came up over and over again of being good quality of course monitors is one of those things that you do get what you pay for generally the more expensive is better and the industry standard if you go to any rental house and you are renting a monitor and a digital tech system they all have eyes these are these are the monitors intended for showing as much color as possible as accurate as possible but these aren't going to be monitors that you want to use you like also check your emails there's going to be like for a dedicated editing system so you might want to take a screen grab of this or write some of these down if you're looking for a better monitor and this is an example of what this system looks like I know that I was following a soup rice on instagram the other day and she just got one of these so again if you value color and you really want to be able to see what your camera actually captured and what a printer might be able to print you need a monitor that can show it instead of a monitor that's only showing you half of what you have to work with that's what when you run into a problem when you print and there's some surprises because you couldn't see it on your monitor also this hood if you're editing consider when you're when you're editing photos working in a darker room and also consider getting a hood so you're not being affected by glare or by ambient light I have a question as far as like you know I'm dealing with the computer that has the I have an apple mac comic now how would that actually worked would I connect the two together so that I would actually be able to use that money because I can't really take the apple and put it inside the ice but okay so part of it so that that's a little starts to get complicated because it has to do with graphics cards as well so ideally and aiso display is going to work best with its own dedicated its own dedicated tower its own system because if you're daisy chaining them it's kind of messing it up so that's kind of a complicated answer but yes in other words it gets more expensive like that um okay a couple more things photoshopped settings we talked about setting up your workspace talked about color calibration okay so for color calibration again we talked about this before you do want to make sure you set up your workspace all the way through um when you have a file that you are going ahead and for example taking from pro photo too srg b you're taking from a massive color space down to something really really small your computer and your photo shop needs to know what to do with that information and it basically crams it in it fits it into that color space but it does so in a couple different ways and there's something that you'll see here called rendering intent and rendering intense changes how the information is crammed in I can get very fancy and explain exactly what it does basically what you want to dio is preview both and see which looks better that's it there so that the two that you would ever care about the two that you would ever care about would be relative color metric and perceptual so in that little so go back again it says it right here ok there's a couple places where you're going to see this you would see this if you are printing your own files you will see this if you are converting to a profile and you're going to see this when you're proofing colors I'll talk about that in a minute but you really just want to test out and see which one works best um the perceptual usually looks more natural to the eye and is less apt to have color banding but you will see some shift sometimes it's a shift in color sometimes is a shift in exposure by the way that it forces all that color information in because basically what it does is it takes all that color information it crams it in there and everything moves around to make space so because all the other colors move around to make space for it um actually I'm going to upset me back that up perceptual does the same thing the perceptual takes all that information and when it crams it in it keeps everything relative to each other and so it'll look like ok we're gonna have smooth ban smooth no banding but there will be color shifts because everything stayed kind of similar relative color metric it doesn't have color shift but you can get banding because it crammed information in there and didn't exactly have a place to put it it doesn't exactly matter but you just need to check it so I want to show you this this file right here I took this portrait there's no crazy colors in this right you wouldn't think there would be a huge difference between rendering intent telling it what to do with that extra color so this is perceptual and this is relative color metric perceptual relative color metrics so there was a change in contrast and in the color just a little bit of the color so what you want to do to figure out which one you actually want is you want to do something called soft proofing saw proofing is your way to see how your file is going to look the very last part is we started off and said okay we have our camera calibration getting our white balance we've got our monitor we went ahead and we got our little our little spider calibrate er we've got a better monitors we've got the color good in the beginning we've got the color good in the middle how do you make sure the color looks good in the end file an end print so in photo shop and in light room you have the way to do some have the way to do something called soft proofing so you have the ability to see what the file will look like either if you convert it from pro photo to s e g b you can see what that change is going to look like and also if you take that photo and you print it on a certain type of printer and paper without going into it basically every printer and every printer and paper have a profile it's called I c c profile and what you can do is you can see if you're going to use that printer and paper what's going to happen your colors it lets you see that right in photo shop so you can have an idea what shifts you're getting and then you can make changes appropriately so this is what it looks like you can download thes for all the papers that you khun by if you're printing yourself and many lambs will provide you with an isis see color profile so you can do a soft proof so for example I use miller's and I was able to contact them and ask them for a profile other other other labs will have specific profiles for specific papers and specific printers so here's what you want to know in photo shop figured of you soft view proof set up on custom this is where you can go ahead and pick your paper you pick your paper and printer combination and you'll see again there it's asking what do I do with this extra color that I don't know what to do with and you have the ability to take to have a preview and so to preview it when you go to view proof colors you can actually see you turn the proof colors on and off it's the same thing if you go ahead and convert it you can do it right there when converting you can convert from pro photo id s rgb and set the rendering a tent and you can turn the proof colors on and off and see what the heck is it doing with the colors you kind of have an idea of how things are going to shift um last thing is printing yourself I'm not going to get into but take a look at the presentation by eddie tap he did a color management presentation here on creative live and he actually went through and printed he did the whole process calibration start to finish it was however a full day class versus an hour and a half so check that one out its excellence just make sure you're not letting your printer manager colors that's kind of the most important part and know that when you're working with lamps asked them what they want for a file find it on the website contact their customer service I use miller's but for example many of them want srg be a bit two pegs which seems very depressing because we started off so huge so you are going to want to try to soft proof and take a look at what these you're going to look like when you've taken all that information and crammed it down into something small trying to get it closest to what your original intent wass let's just ask a couple quick questions here so a question came in from carrie porter who wanted to know about calibration between two different computers are monitors if you're working with an assistant the question is as far seeing the same same thing myself system often helps me with editing when I get visited often have to make small adjustments to her her head it's because of the monitors do you have any tips about that yeah I mean the first thing obviously is to try to do calibration for both use the same calibrate er like use the same system and another difference might be she might have an inexpensive monitor and you might have an expensive one so there's going to be a difference based on which particular monitor you have and how you chose to calibrate it okay and another quick question from sue talking about brightness of your monitor does that affect the calibration your brightness setting yes okay so if you so what you want to do is when you're using this particular spider calibrate er it asked you to set your brightness where you feel comfortable so it actually calibrates based on where you want your brightness that's that system others don't do that and if you go ahead and make your monitor brighter or darker than where you calibrated at color and contrast is going to change and so all of a sudden you've messed up what your color and contrast looks like there are certain recommendations for the correct brightness like I think it's something like there's eighty lumens that you want your monitor set out with eighty to ninety si e m yeah so I got the number there was eighty I don't I don't do that because I know my system says said it where you're comfortable and we'll make it work for you so that's how I choose to work I can guarantee you a really ridiculously high end re toucher probably would go ahead set it to eighty lumens and basic more in that range than just by letting the the monitor and calibrating system talk to each other