Color Management in Digital Photography by Brad Hinkel: Review

To oversimplify things, color management is a term that describes a process to reliably get prints that match, in color and tonality, images on a computer display. There are many books about color management. Most of them are 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 the images that we see on our displays.

Brad Hinkel has written an easy to understand, yet accurate guide to color management. If you are new to color management, this book is a great introduction; you should go buy it now (just click on the book cover on the right to buy it at Amazon). If you are looking for a more detailed treatment, please refer to Fraser's Color Management book, which is also excellent.

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 basic terminology and basic practices of color management. It is written in a simple, approachable manner that goes just deep enough to be very useful without overwhelming the reader.

The rating: 4 out of 5 Stars.

Summary: This book is a great introduction to color management practices for digital photography.

Detailed Review

This is a relatively simple and straight forward book. It is only 100 pages long. However, the book is well written and reflects the author's experience in the field. If you are new to color management, this is the book for you. Color and color management are complex topics to understand. This book lays out the basic steps to achieve the primary goal for most photographers - matching print colors to those on the photographer's monitor - in a very understandable way without a lot of detailed technical information.

The main part of the book discuses 10 steps to achieve a workable color management system. We discuss these chapters in detail below.

Overall, this is a very good book. If you care about consistent color and you are new to color management this book should be high on your list of purchases.

What would I like to see different in this book? Not a whole lot, actually. This is the first edition of the book (published in 2006; there is not yet a second edition). There are numerous typos, though nothing that is too fundamental. There is no reference material or pointers to other sources as there should be so that the reader can continue to learn about the subject. (Though the book's Introduction does indicate that there are "notes and further considerations and resources" at the end of the book; no such material exists.)

The associated website (www.easycolormanagement.com) is not yet completed (3 years after publication). A sample printing target is available (and this is very useful). The "links" page is empty and many of the navigation elements are not active. Even the "Where to Purchase" link is not active. (Given this state of affairs on the website, I wouldn't expect a second edition of the book.) It would be great to have some more advanced tutorial material on the website - including sample images to use for testing both color management setups and for experimenting with the more advanced concepts discussed in the last chapter. Interestingly, the author's website (www.bradhinkel.com) looks like a Chinese language site and I don't see him listed on the faculty at RMSP or PCNW as he indicates in his bio. Hmm.

The introduction and eleven chapters are organized in the following manner:

• Introduction: "Ten Steps for Color Management"

• CHAPTER 1: "What is Color Management?"

• CHAPTER 2: "Step 1: Select a Color Space". This chapter does a good job of explaining the differences between various popular color spaces (sRGB, AdobeRGB, ColorMatch, ProPhoto, eciRGB and scRGB) and motivating the use of sRGB and AdobeRGB. A good non-nonsense approach.

• CHAPTER 3: "Step 2: Get a Good Monitor". Discusses the basics of display technologies: LCD vs. CRT, VGA vs. DVI, display resolutions, video card choices, and multiple monitor setups as well as the impact these things have on color and color management. I would like to see more discussion of the effectiveness of the monitors that most of us have on our desks: standard consumer displays from Viewsonic, Dell, Asus, Samsung, and HP. How do these displays stack up to the more expensive displays described here? This lack of focus on cheaper, readily available options is in contrast to the chapter on printers, where the inexpensive options are suggested.

• CHAPTER 4: "Step 3: Create a Good Work Environment”. This is an often ignored aspect of achieving good color in digital photography. Lighting, room, and computer setups have a big influence on how well you can match print and monitor colors and how well you can evaluate your results.

• CHAPTER 5: "Step 4: Profile Your Monitor". This chapter describes the basics of what it means to profile a monitor without going into details on how a particular hardware dongle or software setup functions. For the most part, using calibration software and hardware is easy. But every setup differs and hence any book that gives specific examples (e.g., screen shots) of the process only applies in that setup. The general approach works well here. And the chapter is only 5 pages long.

• CHAPTER 6: "Step 5: Get a Good Printer". The author's conclusion here is pretty simple: almost any printer will do a pretty good job. Initially, he stresses buying something inexpensive and getting the most out of it before spending more on a professional model. Good advise.

• CHAPTER 7: "Step 6: Basic Printing". How to use the basic printer driver without doing any profiling. This approach is good enough for beginners and in many cases, many people can stop here as the results will be sufficiently good. The author suggests ways to use online printing services. This is a nice touch as many people might not want a printer in the house or may rely on these services for printing large numbers of images. There is a section of this chapter called "A Color Management Workflow" which hits all the high points for how to go about getting good color, including capture, editing, and printing.

• CHAPTER 8: "Step 7: Test Your Color System". By "test", the author means "make some prints and see how well they match the monitor". This is a good approach. Again, for most people if you have followed the initial suggestions in his book you are probably done at this point. There is no need to test in a very detailed, per color patch manner, using a color measurement tool - as may be discussed in other books on color management that are intended for professionals.

• CHAPTER 9: "Step 8: Advanced Printing" If the manufacturer provided papers and profiles aren't good enough - or the paper selection isn't to your liking, this chapter shows how to use advanced techniques in the printer driver and print dialogs to print using self-made or commercially available printer profiles. This chapter discusses rendering intents (a rather sticky and often confusing topic)

• CHAPTER 10: "Step 9: Obtaining Profiles" This chapter briefly discusses generating new custom profiles for your printer, paper and ink combinations.

• CHAPTER 11: "Step 10: Adjusting Your Color for Printing" This is for the truly dedicated: how do you adjust your images to print well on a printer that doesn't cover the full range of colors or tonalities in your images? This touches on the idea of soft proofing, and the use of rendering intent changes, selective saturation changes, selective color changing to manage gamut mismatches between images and printers. This is advanced stuff, but is presented in a reasonably simple manner.