Joe’s How-To Calibration
money and it seemed very complex. But the need to calibrate crept up on me until it became inevitable. Now I calibrate everything – camera, scanner, monitor, printer – and not only do I get consistent color, it makes my workflow much easier.
Joe Doherty
joedohertyphotography@gmail.com I cut my teeth in a world where serious photographers bought film by the case, sacrificed one roll for a series of tests to determine the true speed and color balance of the batch, and refrigerated the rest. In the twenty years that I’ve been doing digital color photography it’s become progressively easier for the average photographer to recreate that process, and surpass it. Consumerlevel calibration packages and professional services give the rest of us control that was undreamed of 40 years ago.
Ansel Adams once compared color photography to playing an out-of-tune piano. When we calibrate each piece of equipment we tune the piano by creating a profile. Cameras have profiles. If you use Adobe Lightroom you probably already use a profile in the Develop Module, such as Adobe Standard or Adobe Vivid. As you switch between them you can see how they interpret the colors captured by your camera. Vivid is more contrasty and more saturated than Standard, but the underlying relationships among the colors remain unchanged.
The purpose of calibration is to standardize the process of color imaging. It provides a “true” baseline of what was photographed, and a system for keeping color and contrast consistent online and in print. It significantly reduces the number of things I need to worry about, giving me more time and energy to create.
I use the X-Rite (now Calibrite) ColorChecker Passport to create custom profiles for my cameras. This involves shooting a color chart and passing it through software that creates a new profile (Figures 1a-1c). The chart is standardized. The software knows what combinations of Red, Green, and Blue to expect from each square, and it creates a profile that adjusts the colors to match what was photographed. In the case of my camera, the custom profile changes the relationship among the colors. It gives me more vivid blues and magentas than the Adobe profiles, while leaving the yellows and oranges unchanged. It is tuning the colors.
The need for calibration has been around for a long time. A clothing designer who commissions a catalog wants her cerulean blue dress to be cerulean blue on the page. A museum wants a catalog with images that faithfully represent the objects in its collection. Both of these have been traditionally accomplished by including a standardized color chart within the image frame, which the printer would then use to calibrate her presses. Now we can incorporate the color chart seamlessly into our workflow at home, calibrating every step in the process.
The differences are subtle but important. If I’m shooting deep purple lupines on the shore of Lake Tahoe, I want the file I start with to be as close as possible to an accurate representation of the scene (Figure 2). From
That said, it took me years to figure out calibration. I was reticent to spend the 18
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