About the color management system
Digital cameras, monitors, and printers that print images each have a different way of presenting color. There may be differences between the way an image appears on a computer monitor and how it looks when it is printed or even viewed on another monitor. The color management system reduces those differences by taking advantage of ICC profiles.
The color matching process:
Setting the color display of the monitor
Setting the application to reflect the monitor and printer settings
Not covered in this article:
Printing and
comparing the monitor color with print results and adjusting to more accurately match.
Set the color on the monitor
When viewing an image on your monitor, the white parts might appear reddish or bluish when the colors are not set correctly.
- You can perform a rough calibration by changing the color temperature. The default color temperature setting for most monitors is often set at about 9300 Kelvin (K). Refer to the instruction manual for your monitor at adjust the color temperature to a value near 6500K.
- If you cannot set the temperature, choose sRGB. You can use a color tuning tool (commercially available) to adjust the colors of monitor more accurately. The tool measures the colors on the monitor and creates an ICC profile with the optimum settings for that monitor.
Set color in Digital Photo Professional
The following instructions explain the settings for the software that will handle the images.
- Start Digital Photo Professional.
- Select Tool -> Preferences.
- Select the Color Management tab.
- Set the default settings of work color space. You can select the color space to be applied as a default setting of RAW images from five types. The color space set will be applied as the color space when a RAW image is converted and saved or printed. See the instructions for your camera to learn how to set it on the camera.
- Set the color matching settings. Choose between sRGB, operating system settings, or select Browse to choose a specific color profile file.
- Choose an ICC profile for the printer.
- You can simulate CMYK by selecting a CMYK simulator profile. This can be useful if you are printing a draft of an image that will eventually be produced by an offset press. The available profiles simulate the press environment. Refer to the Digital Photo Professional Instruction Manual for more information.
- Choose between perceptual and relative coloimetric rendering intents.
- In the [Perceptual] setting, color balance is emphasized. Use this setting to include out-of-range colors that cannot be printed in the original data. The in-range colors are also adjusted to maintain the color balance.
- In the [Relative Colorimetric] setting, color gradation is emphasized. The white color within the printable range in the original data is used for comparison, and out-of-range colors are adjusted to approximate colors that can be reproduced based on the value for white. The colors come out similar to the original colors.
