HERE'S AN OUTLINE OF HOW I TEACH COLOUR MANAGEMENT: I adjust the emphasis according to your needs and interests, and your Photoshop level. You generally have two options when it comes to how you deal with colour management:

Option 1: Let someone implement it for you, by calibrating your equipment, creating profiles, and making some setups for you. This is a partial solution, and a short-term one. The moment you change something, it all comes tumbling down, and you’ll be on the phone to your local colour management geek. And also, you’ll be missing some of the finer features, such as soft-proofing as a part of your workflow. Badly implemented colour management will actually affect your files – it will actually cause colour-loss that's non-reversible and destructive.

Option 2: Learn about it! More than 50% of what makes Colour Management a success is based on day-to-day decision-making. Much of it is about knowing when NOT to do certain things. Making those decisions must be based on a certain degree of understanding of reproduction. It’s also useful to know the general rules that the industry plays by. This is what I can really help you with. Take a look at the contents page for my e-book ESSENTIAL COLOR MANAGEMENT to see what it's all about.

A colour management training session aims to identify any problems with colour fidelity and consistency in your workflow. We discover out where the problems lie, and find the best possible solutions within your budget.

Introduction: A basic understanding of the RGB and CMYK colour spaces is essential. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, which I will explain and demonstrate visually. Device variability is the cause of most colour mismatches. Colour management is very much about managing the expectations of the varying outputs (monitors, printers etc) and tweaking to standardize them as much as possible (calibration and device profiles). We’ll get hands-on with this, and in some cases I'll recommend other services. Images with saturated colours and pastels have to be managed very carefully, and this can’t be done by anybody but yourself, on an image-by-image basis. The many links of the colour management chain must all work together and there must be no break in this chain. It’s a vulnerable process, especially when you hand over a file to someone else. In time, we can hope that everyone will learn to play by the rules, but in the meantime we can just do our best.

Colour management is not only a digital problem. It did not appear along with the digital revolution. It has always been a challenge to the printing professional, but photographers are NOT printing professionals. The fact that non-professionals (who may be pro photographers, but certainly not pro repro people) have come to be responsible for a huge chunk of the reproduction process is really the root of the problem. In fact, it’s the analogue part of the process that is causing most of the grief - not all the noughts and zeros inside the computer! We are often let down by the limited ability of a monitor or the unexpected shift in colour & density when ink hits the paper. Let me outline a couple of curious facts for you to consider before you dive headlong into colour management:

You may have a perfectly calibrated monitor, but if your walls are painted blue (or any other colour) your ability to judge colour will be completely skewed. Even a warm-toned wooden desk will throw your judgement!

Digital colour is nothing but a formula. It’s a recipe for colour that may or may not be reproducible in RGB or CMYK. The purest blue in the most commonly used colour space is not within the gamut of any computer monitor. And if it was, it wouldn’t be within the gamut of your eyes anyway….

Now you’re probably getting the general impression that a colour management session with me is a pretty down-to earth affair, where we try to connect the dots and de-mystify things. It’s quite different from most of the training out there. I play by the same rules as everyone else, but I explain it differently, and try to limit the jargon. I try to connect it to things you already know, so you can make sense of it. I encourage questions and participation, and I like a challenge. I don’t try to 'sell' you something expensive if something free or cheap will do, but I give advice on the alternatives.

Sorry about the small text. Feel free to copy & paste + print. Please contact me if you have any questions by email training@grygarness.com or call 07973 832 033