Quick Summary

A brilliantly useful introduction to Colour Management concepts, tools and techniques. A must-have for anyone looking to really understand colour-management concepts.

Photographers and Artists (e.g. using Photoshop for their own needs) will learn a lot from the book, though some of it will only be handy reference material. It would be great if some high-street shops who provide digital printing services would read this book and act on it... indeed printing companies could learn from this! Budding Colour Managers will find a great deal of this book extremely useful.

Review

At over 500 pages, Real World Color Management (RWCM) is a substantial book covering the fundamentals of Colour and ‘what it is’, Colour Profiles and how they are made and used, and much information about the colour management facilities in some of the most popular graphics and publishing applications. The style of writing is informative and friendly, which seems to be the style for many books written by creative professionals.

Part 1 ‘Introduction to Color Management’ (Chapters 1-4) and approximately 100 pages, forms a very useful introduction to the fundamentals of colour, how computers handle colour, colour management and ICC / ICM profiles. Although much of this section is in some respects more ‘scientific’ than absolutely necessary, we found it an interesting and enjoyable read, especially if you are one of those people who like to know how things work (light and our vision etc). If you want to understand such mysteries as ‘Why can’t we imagine a reddish-green, or a yellowish-blue?’ then you will find the answers here. This section of the book is recommended for most readers as a good grounding to the topic.

Part 2 ‘Building and Tuning Profiles’ (Chapters 5 - 9) discusses the tools and techniques of profiling the main devices; screens, scanners and printers. In addition, some advanced information is available on evaluating and tuning profiles that you have created. These instructions are not detailed in the sense of covering any one particular manufacturer, but they do cover the basics and although some information on products is already outdated (the industry is burgeoning after all) it will give the reader some useful knowledge that may assist in colour management product selection. The usefulness of each chapter will depend on your particular interest in profiling; for example most of our customers will tend not to need information on profiling CMYK printers, but the RGB printer profiling section will be invaluable to many. It is not however a tutorial on your profiling tool, so you should expect to have to think a little about how the information provided may apply to you, to your profiling tools, and your printer (and of course this applies to screen profiling and other profiling too).

Part 3 ‘Applications Workflow’ covers some particularly useful fundamentals in Chapters 10 and 11, with Chapters 12 - 18 covering specifics in relation to various applications like the ‘Adobe Common Color Architecture’, Macromedia Freehand 10, and other specific tools like PDF. Some of this information and will be critical to your understanding of the applications you use... and of course some of it will be almost irrelevant to most readers. Chapter 17 is about Automation, and will be beyond the needs of many readers (not because Automation is a bad idea - but because of the price levels of the ‘Color Server’ tools discussed). Most readers should come back to reading Chapter 18 which summarises the book.

The Appendices cover the structure of ICC profiles, and some suggested workflows for dealing with various colour management circumstances. It also has a rather odd recommendation for a charting tool - it seems a little strange to be discussing such a product in this context. However, the authors obviously like the product, and this is perhaps a reflection of the ‘personality’ that one finds in the book.

Reviewed November 2004, originally read in 2003.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.