Part III, "Applications and Workflow," now gets into the fact that color management is only useful if it can be integrated into a working production system. Here the final nine chapters look at color management workflow both from an analytic standpoint and the then from a practical standpoint. You begin with the major principles that govern how you configure your applications from capture through editing to final output. Next you see how the flow works through your operating system and how things are handled there.
Then you will spend several chapters looking at how products like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, CorelDRAW, and QuarkXPress handle the color technology. Next you will learn how to automate process' using scripting to speed up your work, and finally you will pull it all together by building a working color management workflow
Part IV, "Appendices," contains supplementary material that gets to more detail than would be possible if trying to contain them within some a chapter. One item is getting into the down and dirty details of an ICC profile structure. Here you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about building a profile. Then you are provided with workflow template that you can use to model you own workflow around. Finally there is a twenty page glossary of terms that give better understanding to the terms used throughout the book.
Real World Color Management is not for the timid who wants to get better prints without any work or thought. In fact it is subtitled "Industrial Strength Production Techniques." But, if you are willing to spend some time and effort on learning these techniques, it is probably the most thorough, and easy to understand book on color management on the today.
Granted the Real World Color Management is a couple years old, but it still retains the fundamental knowledge that you need to produce high quality profiles. The other thing is that you do not have to read every word and learn every theoretical discussion to get a lot from this book. Getting the basics from part I, learning to calibrate and do print profiles from part II and discovering a workable workflow from part III will fill many needs. The nice thing is that when you want to learn more, it's here. I very highly recommend Real World Color Management.
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