No matter how much thought and preparation a photographer, artist, or designer puts into the color scheme for a project, unless that color is transposed to the correct output, all of the work is for naught. If your results do not meet the expectation, you may as well not waste your time, money, and energy.
The goal of Real World Color Management, the revised second edition, is to ensure that you know everything that you need to know about color management so that whether your final output is print, web, or film, your expectations will be met and you will achieve the color fidelity that you need to get your job done. Real World Color Management Second Edition is 608 pages in length, contains 18 chapters and divided into four parts. I will highlight the breakdown of the four parts
Part I, "Introduction to Color Management," encompasses the first four chapters and it lays the groundwork for the remainder of the book. Here you will explore topics such as what is color? Computers and color, color management, and examine what profiles are. While you don't have to be a color expert to use color management, you do have to have understanding of the fundamentals to understand the problems that color management addresses.
You also must understand the fact that computers know nothing about color except what people tell them. Because computers understand numbers, to get devices to understand what you mean when you say "red" you must learn to communicate to these different electronic devices with kind of numbers that they understand. To do this you will learn about color management and how they relate to device profiles; a file that correlates device color values with corresponding device-independent color values that represent the actual color that people see.
Part II, "Building and Tuning Profiles," explains the fact that color management succeeds or fails based on the accuracy of the profiles that we use to describe the way our color reproduction devices behave. In these next five chapters you will look at real world techniques for creating, evaluating, tuning and maintaining device profiles. You start by learning about measurement, calibration, and process control. Then you learn about building display profiles so that you can see the correct color on your display.
Next you will see how to build input profiles; a profile for an input device such as a digital camera, or scanner, because until you are sure that what is coming in is correct there is no way to really measure what is going out. Then you move on to the output profile which is what is used to calibrate devices like printers, or profiling devices. Next you learn how to evaluate and edit your profiles. By learning to evaluate, you see how far off you really are from the desired output. Getting good profiles requires attention to detail and persistence. Getting a great profile takes even more work.
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