Monday's Link

There's something to be said about the simplicity of film. You took a photo and after doing the same thing 36 times you took a little cassette out of the back of your camera and handed it over to the processing lab where they took care of everything for you. If you were shooting print film you could ask for adjustments to the colours but if you were shooting slide film you were out of luck. What you saw was what you got. So you chose your slide film according to the colours you wanted. Maybe a Fuji Velvia for bright, saturated landscapes. Maybe a Provia for natural looking colours for documentary work.

Then slide scanners came along and suddenly we had the ability to change the colours in our pictures. How wonderful. Suddenly Photoshop and the computer gave us the ability that the black and white folks had had for a hundred years or so.

But it was a double edged sword. How did we know that the colour we saw on our monitors were the same as our clients saw? Why did our pictures published in magazines sometimes look nothing like the digital file we saw on our own screens. We were thrust headlong into the world of colour management.

Then digital cameras came along and changed things even more. Now we had a choice of colour spaces (whatever they were!) - sRGB vs Adobe RGB. We were suddenly told we needed to calibrate our monitors and our printers and to get proper colours we needed to say a few Hail Marys at the same time.

Joking aside, colour management is really important in ensuring that what you see on your monitor looks like what you get in your prints. I found a great little site which has an introductory primer to colour management and you can find it here. There's a few pages to read but I'm sure it will help you if you're finding it all a bit hard to understand.