Color Management for Black and White - Black and White in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Lightroom - page 2

several times by several dif erent Photoshop experts before it all integrated
ef ectively into my workl ow. As an honor student in my undergraduate
studies, as well as my graduate work, I typically do not consider myself
particularly stupid, but this color management stuf twisted my head into knots
for quite some time. As an experiential learner, I love to jump into new things
with both feet and, as a result, I often end up doing things the wrong way i rst.
Although I did have more fun in the beginning of my digital learning process,
I eventually learned the hard way that skipping over color management
was dei nitely not the best choice. Color management is without a doubt an
absolutely essential piece of the workl ow process. Although not the most
exciting topic, color management is the foundation upon which everything in
the digital darkroom process is built. So whether you work in color or black and
white, learning the basics up front will serve you well in the digital process.
Unfortunately for the creative user, color management really is quite complex.
There are reasons why there are in-depth, full-length texts devoted entirely to
this topic alone. Fortunately, for most users, grasping the entire scope of all the
technical information available is not an absolute necessity. For the purposes
of this topic, I have weeded through all of the technical jargon and simplii ed
the majority of the complexity into i ve easy steps. These i ve steps will not only
get you in the ball park … but probably all the way to third base with color
knowledge in your own personal digital darkroom. The last bit - from third
base to the home plate - is the volumes of information within those full-length
texts that will either bore you to tears or tantalize your inner nerd beyond
comprehension. So, for the sake of making this text user-friendly, I hope to
avoid boring you to tears, while leaving the rest to the technical gurus who have
already extensively detailed all the i ner nuances of this topic. Check out the
Digital Dog a.k.a. Andrew Rodney's Color Management for Photographers: Hands
on Techniques for Photoshop Users published by Focal Press for more in-depth
information.
What does color management have to do with Black
and White anyway?
It is true that color management for black and white purposes just does not
seem quite right. Managing your system for color, however, is actually the
truest test for black and white accuracy. If you have a completely accurate
color balanced system, you are in a position to produce more neutral black
and white prints, make the best possible conversions, and assess contrast and
tonality variations within an image. For the traditional photographer, this is
the digital equivalent to standardizing development variables in a darkroom
workl ow: Dektol 1:1 at 68 degrees for example. Understanding what all this is
about can actually help you create far better prints than ever before!
The Essential Overview
Color management dei ned
Color management is basically the ability to consistently control the
reproduction of color and tonality in the digital environment; or more