Erin Sparler’s Blog

Alternative Thought on Color Calibration

So I’ve been thinking and teaching about color management and color calibration in my Desktop Publishing, Web Design and Vector Graphics classes at Central Penn and last night I had an alternative though about the process.

To color calibrate your monitor the current thought process in the photography field is that you calibrate your monitor so that your prints match your display. You buy a color calibrations tool like the Spyder or the EyeOne, which you then place on your monitor and it reads the levels and colors of light being projected to your eyes.

However, this doesn’t always work. It will help, but it is never perfect. Invariably the prints that you create will be slightly darker, or contain less saturation, or whatever. They will be closer to what you see on your monitor, but never perfect.

At John Paul Caponigro’s workshop he teaches a method that results in beautiful prints through trial and error and careful minute changes to observed hardproofs. He sets up a file in Photoshop that looks just so, then he duplicates it and turns on softproofing in Photoshop and selects the printer and paper to print to on the duplicate image. Caponigro then makes color corrections as adjustment layers to the soft proofed version comparing it to the on screen original. Finally he prints a 8.5 x 11 sheet with the softproofed image and its adjustments along with any accompanying printer information as a reference.

Once the image is printed he observes the printer softproof, which is now a hard proof, under 6500K lighting or natural sunlight. He looks for color casts, loss of detail in the shadows or highlights, or other inconsistencies with the original (ie desired) image. He then goes back and makes changes to the adjustment layers and prints it again. And again, and again, and again…

When I inquired as to how many times he commonly prints he stated that it can be anywhere upwards of 15 times!

What a waste of paper. Makes me feel bad killing all those trees. And then if your anything like me you end up with prints, that are close to what you want, and you don’t half mind or want to keep as a reference of process, but can’t be used in a show, so they just take up work space. Sometimes you even end up with a print that later on down the road you might return to and think, wow, I like that one better. So I end up storing all these not quite prints hating to throw them out.

Then last night after discussing this process and the whole conundrum of color calibration and proofing in class, it occurred to me that perhaps instead of calibrating the monitor so that your prints match the display, perhaps you could calibrate the monitor to match the prints.

This would require a tool that has long been used by the graphic design and print industry. The Pantone swatch book. (Although you could create a swatch book or a color wheel on your own printer that might accomplish the same thing.) I’m not entirely sure as of yet how you would accomplish calibrating your monitor to look like the physical pantone swatches, but my Spyder came with 2 other CDs, so my next step is to read up on the content and tools on these CDs. It seems to me there aught to be a way to create adjust your monitor to display that colors based on Pantone swatches.