Opinion: Without a positive in hand, color management is a thorny issue, and photographers face a huge challenge getting satisfactory end results.Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a two-part piece on color management in photography. Part Two will run next week.
Digital technology has now been massively adopted by pro photographers.
The immediacy of digital is persuasive, and the new crop of digital SLRs and camera backs demonstrate all the quality a client could want.
But with every new technology there are advantages and drawbacks.
In the case of digital photography, pros have found exposure control to be different but much easier, while color management is turning into the new industry headache.
Exposure was hard, in the times of film; back then, really bad exposure often meant a dead shot—no comebacks.
Now exposure's easy. It's easy because the nice image preview on the back of your camera shows up catastrophic errors in time for you to retake the shot.
It's easy because the histogram display of the camera describes the scene's dynamic range; the histogram is your best friend in the field.
And it's easy because you can shoot raw. Thanks to the wonderfully forgiving nature of the raw format, you can usually recover from mostly any exposure mistake by means of an exposure adjustment in the raw converter.
Adobe's DNG format facilitates handling of raw files.Click here to read more.
Lastly, the remarkable exposure tolerance of digital is further aided by the low marginal cost of materials: Bracketing is essentially free!
In practice, protecting the highlights from burnout is the single remaining exposure difficulty in digital, as burnt-out areas are permanently gone.
However, manufacturers have tackled this issue: The latest Fuji SLRs have an imager that independently registers highlights, while the low shadow noise of Canon's newest cameras makes it reasonable to underexpose slightly, leaving more latitude for the highlights.
Invariably, some burnt-out areas will still occur.
Specular reflections on noses or foreheads are repeat offenders that demand retouching: Choose a large soft clone brush, set opacity to 30 percent, and swipe in from the sides, and that shiny, burnt-out forehead is soon powdered over.
Point of fact, it's mostly easier to retouch than to make-up.
Next Page: A look at color challenges.
Now that we've seen that exposure has become easy in the digital world, let's look at color.
I have a friend, Julius, who owns some digital equipment, but still uses 4-by-5 slide film for art reproduction work.
Why? In this digital age, surely the final print reproduction will entail an encoding of the colored dyes in the transparency into bits and bytes.
Yet it would be painful to ensure the same degree of color consistency in the approval workflow by digital means alone.
Julius will show the Ektachromes to everyone concerned.
The artist will look at it in his studio and will express his satisfaction.
The gallery gets to see it before approving the print; the printer gets it, and is asked to match print to transparency.
By means of passing around his sample transparency, Julius gains the guarantee of consistency that comes from the fact that everyone is indeed looking at the same unique physical object.
To achieve satisfactory color for his clients, Julius relies on old technology: A 4-by-5 camera; the standard Ektachrome film that he knows well and buys in batches; his own lights and filters; a pro lab he knows well; and a couple of test charts placed on the sides of the painting to check for good exposure and color balance.
And, in the end, all he really needs or wants to have in hand is a single slide in a protective sleeve!
To me, Julius is a hero.
Julius lives daily with what I consider to be my worst nightmare: clients who can see minor color distinctions (they're artists) and who care passionately about getting the color right (it's their work).
As he puts it: "When a guy has spent 20 years perfecting his signature green, if I don't show him his signature green, he chucks the photo out."
Fortunately, most of us do not have Julius' constraints; our clients are less picky. Still, revisiting this example gives good warning of the finger-pointing that may occur if you do not take color management into account in your workflow.
The first and worst problem we have is how to avoid showing different people different pictures when we would like them to be viewing the same image.
When one makes a digital picture, it is not an object, but a file.
Any one object is unique, but a file may view very differently on various pieces of equipment, say, your favorite monitor and my calibrated home display.
How do we make sure clients see the same thing we did on our own retouching monitors?
How do we allow clients to guess what can be shown in print? Remember, print is light reflected by ink on paper, and this has a very different rendition from a luminous screen.
The gamuts—the range of available viewable colors—are very different for print and screen, or even different papers.
Indeed, if we run off a print on one printer, can we match it on a different press?
Is there a way to preview what is going to happen to our nice image when printed on matte art paper instead of a Frontier glossy photo print?
You can see the headaches coming. Julius, clever fellow, has short-circuited this whole can of worms thanks to that Ektachrome slide he waves around.
The questions he cannot answer he just ignores.
But for the rest of us, resolute to go wholly digital, from shoot to print, employing the so-called ICC Color Management Systems is the only viable option.
I will provide an introduction to—and tongue in cheek critique of—CMS in the next column. For now, gentle reader, allow me and Julius to wish you a colorful week!
Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.
