Real World Color Management, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Essential reading if digital colors are part of your craft
Review: Until I read this book, I had no idea how complex the management of color is in the digital environment. The level of detail in this book is impressive and the authors go all the way down to the most trivial of specifics. For example, they recommend that when you are finalizing your color settings, you should do so in a room with the walls the proper color and wearing the appropriate color of clothing.
The authors explain the various digital representations of color and are very honest about the reality of trying to make your colors portable. Their sections on profiles is complete, covering display, input and output profiles. The next segment of the book is how to manage the colors in the operating system, Adobe products, Macromedia Freehand 10, CorelDraw 10, QuarkXPress, and PDF files. It is all brought together in the last chapter, where all the stages in the "journey" of a pixel, from the initial capture to the final output are listed and summarized.
If color is an important component of your work, then reading this book is an absolute necessity. I strongly recommend it for web designers as well as graphics artists. It has been placed on my shelf of critical reference books.

Rating:
Summary: Focus on colour profiles
Review: [A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2004.]

For graphics designers, the book aims to demystify how to use colouring in your work. The authors give a thorough elucidation of what they term "colour management". Starting with the basics of a source of illumination, an object being viewed, and an observer, which could be a person or instrument. Don't worry about the underlying physics. The book goes briefly through just enough for your needs. (No equations!)

The key idea is the colour profile and the Profile Connection Space. As you might expect, the colour example diagrams used to help show this idea are carefully chosen. Many chapters delve into the various profile topics. Like making input profiles, editing these and using them in your workflow.

One interesting photo, to me, was of various HAND-HELD spectrophotometers. The ones I used in the 80s were hulking giants, some 1-2m on a side, and atop sturdy lab benches. Now you can hold the latest in your hand! Wow.

The book talks about digital cameras as a common input device, as you might expect, given their popularity. Sadly, no mention of Foveon's unique camera. Which does not use CCDs, but has another innovative method with very high resolution. This camera is still new and expensive. But it may soon define the best in digital cameras.