I have been looking at the i1 Product Line that began with the i1 Basic over the course of several articles. In this installment, I am going to look at the i1 Digital Camera Upgrade Module. The use of this module is to build a custom profile for your digital camera.
There are two fundamental paths that you can take with the i1 line: i1 Basic and the i1 XTreme. The i1 Basic is marketed as an affordable, upgradeable, professional spectral color measurement solution and monitor profiler. Once you own the i1 Basic, you own the capabilities of the other modules; you only need to purchase an access code to activate them. Here I will look at the ease of use of the i1 Digital Camera Upgrade Module. This camera profiler module will allow you to accurately match the colors your camera captures with what you see on the screen and eventually send to the printer. This module comes standard comes as a part of the i1 XTreme.
What does it take to run the i1 Basic? Either a Windows 2000, XP, or Vista with a 300 MHz processor or better, or Mac OS X (10.3 or higher) Power G3 or higher processor, a powered USB port, 128 MB RAM, and 100 MB of hard-drive space.
Once you have your module installed, you need to make sure that you have your monitor calibrated as in part one of this series. Now it is time to calibrate your camera. Effectively what you will be doing is taking a photograph of a color chart in the type of lighting that you use to photograph in. One thing to note is that along with purchasing the upgrade module, you will need to purchase a color chart as well. The one that I am using is the Digital Color Checker SG from XRite.
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