X-Rite i1Studio
Andy Westlake investigates a comprehensive colour-management solution for photographers
Andy Westlake reviews a colour-management solution for photographers
Ever since photographers started manipulating and printing images digitally on computer screens, we’ve had the same perennial headache. How can we make sure that the colours captured by our cameras are displayed correctly on our monitors, and then reproduced accurately when we come to print our carefully manipulated files?
The answer lies in colour management – a process that can appear dauntingly complex, particularly to newcomers. At the barest minimum, this means calibrating your screen so it’s set up in a standardised fashion in terms of brightness, contrast and colour balance. But doing it properly requires profiling using a device known as a spectrophotometer. This measures in forensic detail exactly how your monitor renders colour, and then generates a profile that’s used by your computer’s operating system to ensure that your images are displayed correctly on-screen.
When it comes to output, you also need profiles that describe how your printer reproduces colour with each type of paper you plan to use. Printer and paper manufacturers usually provide downloadable generic profiles that do a pretty good job, but for the very best results, you’ll need to generate your own, particularly if you like experimenting with different types of paper. The catch is that most affordable calibration systems only work with monitors, not printers.
With i1Studio, colour-management specialist X- Rite has come up with a system that allows serious photographers to adopt a completely colour-managed workflow, from capture through display to print. It’s a replacement for the firm’s older ColorMunki Photo system, using essentially the same hardware but with new software that crucially now works properly on Windows 10. In principle it allows you to profile the colour characteristics of cameras and scanners when first recording images, of monitors and projectors when displaying them, and of printers when outputting your finished work. You can even profile iPhones and iPads to ensure they display colours correctly. Getting started When you first open the i1Studio box, you’ll find the colour measurement
device itself complete with a snugly fitting neoprene case and a weighted strap, along with a USB connection cable and a small X- Rite ColorChecker Classic reference card. However there’s no manual of any sort, nor a physical copy of the i1Studio software. Instead you’re directed to X- Rite’s website, from where you must first download and install the program that will make everything work.
On opening the software, you’re presented with a short list of options in a Workflow Selector panel on the left of the main screen. These allow you to create profiles for displays, scanners and printers, including the option to make special profiles for printing in black & white. There’s no explicit attempt to guide you through what order you should do each, but the first step is to calibrate and profile your monitor. Monitor profiling Profiling a monitor using i1Studio is pretty straightforward. Click the Display icon in the Workflow panel, and the software will tell you to plug in the spectrophotometer, then guide you through the process. The first step is hardware calibration to optimise your monitor’s brightness and colour balance. This can require plenty of button-pressing on the display itself, but is all guided by easy-to-follow on-screen prompts.
The spectrophotometer then works its way through measuring 118 different colours that are displayed sequentially on the screen. Thankfully you don’t have to hold the device in place manually, as you can hang it over your monitor with the counter-weighted strap on the opposite side. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, and once complete, the software will calculate a colour profile for your monitor. It’s possible to set a reminder to recalibrate periodically, which is good practice for keeping your system tightly colour-managed. Printer profiling When it comes to generating printer profiles, the process is again quite straightforward, if a little more time- consuming. The software guides you along in a Help panel on the left of the window, while your progress through the various steps is tracked below. However, one thing it doesn’t instruct you on is the correct printer settings to use: it’s vitally important to ensure that any colour- enhancement options are disabled in the printer driver.
The fi rst step is to print a set of standardised colour patches onto the paper you’re profiling, and allow the print to dry for 10 minutes. You then scan the spectrophotometer across the rows of patches, with the software tracking your progress on- screen. Once this is complete, i1Studio calculates a new set of colour patches to refi ne the initial measurements, and you repeat the process with another test print.
After the second print is successfully scanned, i1Studio generates a profile which you can then use for printing. Needless to say, it’s crucial to give each profile you make an easily recognisable file name so that you can easily recall it in the future.
The same method is used to make specialist profiles for monochrome printing, with the main difference being that the patches used in the second printing stage are completely different, and spread across two sheets of paper. At the end you can save a choice of profiles: in addition to Standard BW, you can output Sepia Tone, Cold Tone and High Contrast variants, all from the same set of measurements. The idea is that when it’s time to make a print, the profile will strip all the colour from your images and produce output with the requisite tonality. It’s an interesting idea, although personally I’d rather convert my images to monochrome and tone them before printing.
Scanner and camera profiling Profiling a scanner is also a straightforward process. First, you need to disable any colour- enhancement settings in your scanning program. You then simply scan the included ColorChecker target, and import the file into i1Studio for analysis. If you assign the resultant profile to any subsequent scan, it should make the colours a close match to the original. This is really handy when you want to copy a print without the colours going awry.
In principle it’s possible to profile cameras in the same way, but I’m not convinced it’s a good idea. Profiling is all about maintaining accurate colour, but that’s not necessarily what photographers want at the taking stage, as a true-to-life rendition of the world is often dull. Instead, it’s the camera’s job to produce an attractive-looking interpretation of the colours in the scene, which usually means pepping things up a bit. But the option is there, and could be useful if you want to match the output from cameras of different brands.