C H A P T E R
Postproduction and Album Design
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ince the digital revolution, the photographer’s job has become more complex. Responsibility for retouching, color management, album
design, and even printing is now something that many wedding photographers readily shoulder—in exchange for the vastly improved creative control that comes with being able to control every step of the process. The work done at this phase of the process is something that often helps a great photographer stand out from the competition. COLOR MANAGEMENT
So why, even in a color-managed system, does the print sometimes look different than the screen image? The answer rests not so much in the color-management process, but in the differences between media. Because monitors and printers have different color gamuts (fixed ranges of color values they can produce), the physical properties make it impossible to show exactly the same colors on your screen and on paper. However, effective color management allows you to align the output from all of your devices to simulate how the color values of your image will be reproduced in a print. Monitor Profiles. If you set up three identical monitors and had them display the exact same image, they would each look a bit different. This is where profiles come into play. Profiling, which uses a hardware calibration device and accompanying software, characterizes the moni-
tor’s output so that it displays a neutral (or at least a predictable) range of colors. A monitor profile is like a color-correction filter. Returning to the example of the three monitors above, one monitor might be slightly green, one magenta, and one slightly darker than the other two. Once a monitor is cal-
The GretagMacBeth Eye One spectrophotometer comes with a convenient ruler guide and backing board so that the colored wedges of the test print can be read quickly and accurately. The data is then processed to create a color profile that gets loaded into the computers that are printing to a specific printer with the profiled paper. POSTPRODUCTION AND ALBUM DESIGN 105
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