Real World Color Management by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting: Review

To oversimplify things, color management is a term that describes the process that one must follow to reliably get prints that match, in color and tonality, images on a computer display. There are dozens of books about color and color management. most of them are almost completely inscrutable unless you are a "color scientist". It really shouldn't be this hard. All that most of us want is for our prints to look like our displays.

Fraser, Murphy and Bunting have put together a detailed, complete and readable guide to color management. If this book isn't already on your shelf you should go buy it now (just click on the book cover on the right to buy it at Amazon).

The Bottom Line

Color management is necessary for almost everyone doing digital imaging or digital video. This book is a great way to learn the terminology and basic practices of color management without going back to school to learn them.

The rating: 5 Stars.

Summary: This book is a great tutorial and reference for everything that you will probably ever need to know about color theory, practice, and management.

Detailed Review

This is a big book. It is 600 pages long and includes some very difficult topics. However, this book is well written, well illustrated, and reflects the decades of experience the authors have in the field. The size of the book and complexity of the subject matter shouldn't scare you away.

The first four chapters cover the basics of color and color management. These chapters have a lot of great material in them. This is necessary material to have under your belt before tackling the "how do I do it" questions that have led you to this book in the first place. Without a solid understanding of the basics, the best that you can do is follow somebody's step-by-step instructions. In the end, if you follow a recipe that someone else devises you won't know if things are working or how they work; you won't be able to recognize and fix problems when they come up in the future. In short, you won't be much better off than you are now.

Color is a complex topic to understand. This book lays out the basics in a very understandable way without a lot of detailed technical information. There is some here... you can't avoid it completely. But there are no equations to understand and everything is written in relatively simple English with good examples and analogies. If you don't have a solid grasp of saturation, hue, RGB, CMYK and other color terms that come up all the time in digital photography and video, then the first chapter in particular will have you saying "oh yeah! I get it now" a lot.

The second chapter puts the color theory from the first chapter in perspective in a digital world. How do computers work with color? The third and fourth chapters then dive into color management. What is it? How does it work? What is a profile and why might I care? Again, this is detailed information presented in an easy to understand manner.

You certainly won't internalize everything in these first four chapters on the first reading. I have had this book for several years. I periodically reread it. As I become more proficient in digital photography and digital video, I pull out new details from the book that I did not get the last time. This is a trait of great literature - approachable but deep.

The second section of the book (chapters 5-9) discuses profiles in detail - how they are created, how to evaluate them and how to use them. Again, there is a lot of material here that won't necessarily spark your interests on the first reading. Subsequent readings will have you saying "I get it now".

The third section of the book (chapters 11-18) goes through the use of color management in various popular operating systems and software packages. All of my work is in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator on a PC, so I have always focused on chapters 11 and 12. These chapters walk through the intrinsic operating system support for color management, the way that device drivers manage color, and the way that applications use color management. The first time I read this book, I was trying to solve a color management problem on my home system. I dove right into these chapters, but I found that I needed to go back and make sense of the first two parts of the book first. After I did that, these chapters helped me make sense of my own system and see how to solve my problems.

Overall, this is a great book. It is not written as reference book, but for me it functions like one, albeit one very readable reference book. If you care about consistent color this book should be very high on your list of purchases.

The nine chapters and two appendices are organized in the following manner:

• PREFACE: "Overview: The Big Picture"
• CHAPTER 1: "What Is Color: Reflections on Life"
• CHAPTER 2: "Computers and Color: Color by the Numbers"
• CHAPTER 3: "Color Management: How It Works"
• CHAPTER 4: "All About Profiles: Describing Devices"
• CHAPTER 5: "Measurement, Calibration, and Process Control: The Map Is Not the Territory”
• CHAPTER 6: "Building Display Profiles: Your Window to Color"
• CHAPTER 7: "Building Input Profiles: Starting Out Right"
• CHAPTER 8: "Building Output Profiles: Final Destinations"
• CHAPTER 9: "Evaluating and Editing Profiles: Color Orienteering"
• CHAPTER 10: "Color-Management Workflow: Where the Rubber Meets the Road"
• CHAPTER 11: "Color Management In the Operating System: Who Does What To Whom, When?"
• CHAPTER 12: "The Adobe Common Color Architecture: Color Management in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator"
• CHAPTER 13: "Color Management In Macromedia FreeHand 10: Capable But Quirky"
• CHAPTER 14: "Color Management In CorelDRAW 10: It Manages Everything But Its Own Files"
• CHAPTER 15: "Color Management In QuarkXPress: Incremental Improvements"
• CHAPTER 16: "Color Management and PDF: The Wave of the Future"
• CHAPTER 17: "Automation and Scripting: The Smart Way to be Lazy"
• CHAPTER 18: "Building Color-Managed Workflows: Bringing It All Together"