Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
was working with a color management pipeline prior to the release of
Photoshop 5 using Live Picture, which supported ICC profiles. You can
learn more about Ekta Space at http://www.josephholmes.com/
profiles.html.
Joseph continues to produce stunning imagery and lives on the bleed-
ing edge of color management to this day. He's a frequent contributor to
the ColorSync list and provided the excellent recipe in Chapter 6 for pro-
ducing a lighting system using SoLux bulbs (see the side bar in Chapter
6, “Building Your Own Joseph Holmes SoLux Light System”). Joseph is
a rare breed. He's an amazingly talented photographer whose landscapes
are breathtaking and at the same time he's a color geek of high magni-
tude that can talk the ICC talk like the best of the color geeks and color
scientists (conversations that make my head spin). Joseph is the author
of ColorBlind Prove it! software for monitor calibration, which was dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, and he is the inventor and patent holder of the Small
Gamut method of printing monochrome images. I'd highly recommend
you investigate his web site at http://www.josephholmes.com/
index.html.
In Joseph Holmes's Words
Making pictures digitally without color management reminds me a lot of
making a painting with my eyes closed. Keeping color constant, from
subject or film to working space, to monitor, to any and all printers, is
fundamental to practical high-quality imaging. Prior to the appearance
of methods that rely on ICC-format device and working space profiles,
we had to rely on standardized tables for converting monitor (typically
Trinitron) RGB into printing press CMYK or ink-jet CMYK or the like, to
get some of what color management now offers. The old approach is very
limiting, but could be quite good in a few respects, simplicity for one. The
new approach is anything but simple with respect to understanding it,
setting it up right, and getting great profiles to use, but using it is easy
enough, once everything is in place.
When I teach people how color management works, I emphasize
three-dimensional understanding of what's going on with image colors.
I find that simple illustrations made with one's hands in the air can go a
long way toward explaining most of the elements of color management,
such as the ways that white, black, and other colors are moved around
during mapping between different kinds of profiles/spaces and with the
various rendering intents. A clever diagram or two can help a lot, too.
It also helps to understand the mechanisms that engineers have had
to create to obtain the results that color management offers. So now that
top quality, mostly complete solutions (at least for working with color
images) have been possible to assemble for some years, the biggest
problem with color management continues to be its complexity and con-
fusion in the minds of photographers and others who use it. I would say
