by Alan Hutchison: How many of you have a true grip on your colour profiling throughout your workflow?
Sure, you’ve calibrated your monitor right? But what about that printer?
If you’re anything like me, you may have thought that proper printer profiling was the stuff of Voodoo and expensive peripherals with funny “spectra-something” names. I certainly was – Until I saw a demo of the ColorMunki Photo.
Up until now, my colour profiling really just centred around my monitor – get that adjusted and then simply use the correct ICC profile for my selected printer/paper combination, right? Well I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been truly satisified with the results. To the point that I generally outsource all my printing to a local lab. Even then, I still get the occasional ropey output from the lab and have yearned to bring at least the smaller print jobs back in house.
Well, having witnessed how easy it is to profile a printer using the ColorMunki Photo I’m going to re-think my entire print workflow. This unit is superb.
The Colormunki Photo is USB based and works like any other display calibrator – i.e. run the software, hold the calibrator against the screen when prompted, watch the pretty flashing cos and voila, your done.
When it comes to calibrating the printer it’s equally as straightforward. The software generates a test print which creates a numbers of coloured blocks in straight lines down the page. Once printed, the software cleverly sets a waiting time for the ink to properly dry and be absorbed into the paper – you are then prompted to scan the ColorMunki unit along each set of bars. Any misalignment is flagged up by the software, but it is very easy and quick to scan the print. Having processed the results, the software generates a second test print which is scanned once more. At that point you now have a fully matched profile for your printer and the selected paper.
Having witnessed the an image from screen display to the printed output, the colour matching is absolutely spot on – to the point that this unit is now top of my shopping list.
Furthermore, if you’ve been following Gavin’s advice on using a projector to sell large wall prints, you’ll be glad to know that this unit can also calibrate projector output very quickly and easily, ensuring your images look at their best when showing them to clients. It takes all of two minutes to calibrate a projector using this unit.
It’s an excellent piece of kit which retails for around £280 in the UK, 440 Euros in Europe and around $500 in the USA. However B & H has it on special for only $310 right now – I think I’ll be importing mine from the USA. You can also find it on Amazon.
Anyone want to buy my old Huey?
