![]() ![]() When I’d finished a draft of an image, it would be output to film, then sent to a room out the back where a guy would make a Cromalin print from it, by hand. ![]() One of my jobs was to do color correction for a well-known nationwide clothing retailer, and the process wasn’t nearly as simple as pressing “print” and getting approval. Automatic color management wasn’t really widely used back then, and we had a system that worked. ![]() Every month or so we would tweak the individual color curves that drove our monitors, matching an on-screen image in Photoshop to match a known good Cromalin print of the same image (a very nice, glossy, vibrant one-off print). CRT monitors were the best we could get, but they would drift over time. In the early years of this millennium, I was working in print, in a reprographics house in London, doing design, color correction and retouching. And even before the tools made this easy, color correction was important. We’ll start with a talk about print, because in many ways, color management is far more advanced in the print world. Let’s start with a look back at how things used to work without color management. If you’re delivering to TV or cinema, you should be judging color on a broadcast-quality monitor with a specific delivery color space, and likely using DaVinci Resolve or another app which offers far finer control over color than an “everyday” NLE like FCP or Premiere Pro. Up front, my focus here is on color correction for everyday online uploads, and not for broadcast or feature film exhibition. The bad news is that many apps don’t do the right thing, and it all falls apart. And all that stuff’s supposed to match, right? The good news is, if your apps do “the right thing” then it’s should all work seamlessly. ![]() Without it, what you see in your edit bay won’t necessarily match what your viewers see on their computers, phones, tablets, TVs, cinema screens or printed material. Color management (and understanding color management) isn’t a dark art, but there’s more to it than most people realize. ![]()
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January 2023
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