The Hows and Whys of Color Management!

Color management is the processes that photographers need to use to make sure their images look how they should!

Why would you want to be color managed? Well, if you haven't calibrated it already, your monitor sucks for looking at photographs! Out of the box, monitors are typically far too bright, have too much blue color, and make your photographs look horrible. The good news is that it is easy to fix!

The first step is to get some sort of monitor calibration device. You can find a whole lot of options at b&h, the world's largest photo store in New York. What you need really depends on how serious you are. Any of them are better than nothing and both Colorvision and Pantone have excellent solutions for around $200.

Then you follow the very easy steps that the software included in the bundle will walk you through. This takes about 15 minutes and should be done once every couple of months, unless you just bought a new monitor, in which case you should do it weekly until you see very little in the way of changes between adjustments.

Then you send in a file to your lab. Make sure to request no corrections. When you get the print back, compare it to your photograph on your monitor. You may need to make some minor corrections to your color profile.