BIOS: Technology Means Business

Colour Confidence Studio Pro is a high-end solution for professional digital photographers and other digital image users looking to adjust a monitor's calibration parameters in order to achieve a great looking screen and accurate prints. The contents of the suite are initially a little overwhelming, but after a little time offer a relatively easy way to calibrate your monitor and optimise prints.

Pros: Powerful and effective
Cons: Installation process is unclear; poor documentation

TypeMaker's Colour Confidence Studio is a colour management solution designed for those who work with digital images on-screen before printing, such as graphic designers or digital photographers.

Available for both Windows and Mac platforms, Colour Confidence Studio Pro comprises a Colour Guidance Document (a PDF that provides information on setting up your system for colour management both at system and application level), a Repro Pack (software that provides instant feedback on the colour accuracy of your monitor and printer), a Pantone ColorVision Spyder (USB device used to calibrate and profile a CRT or LCD monitor), and iCorrect Professional (a Photoshop plug-in for enhancing the colour of images with 'just one click').

Installing and configuring Colour Confidence Studio is a little bewildering initially because there are so many elements to the colour management solution. For instance, it comes with no less than four CDs, a reference print for matching prints, and no manual. Thankfully there's a quick-start sheet to get you on your way, but you're still strongly encouraged to read the PDF manuals found on the various CDs. TypeMaker could have made a much better effort to hold your hand through the setup procedure, especially as the best starting point to colour management is education.

Colour Confidence Studio is all about helping you to configure your system so that your graphics application displays images as correctly as possible. For example, configuring programs, such as Adobe's Photoshop, is crucial if you want to be able to verify that your monitor profile (RGB) is correct and that ongoing work is being similarly displayed correctly before printing (CMYK). To verify the accuracy of your monitor profile, Colour Confidence Studio provides an instrument-based monitor profiler (Spyder), a digital test image, embedded profile software and a reference print. It's also worth noting that the package includes a pre-calibration utility, which when used to adjust a monitor's own colour controls prior to calibration, ensures that the screen displays the widest possible colour gamut the monitor is capable of.

In a nut shell, a computer monitor (or TV) uses RGB (red, green and blue) light signals to reproduce colour. Scanners and digital cameras also record in this mode. RGB is generally defined within a scale of 0-255 levels for each RGB signal. A desktop printer, photocopier, or traditional printing press will generally apply colour with CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) inks. CMYK is generally defined within a scale of 0-100%. The problem therefore occurs when prints do not look like their on-screen counterparts, primarily because of the different colour systems used. An ICC colour profile, or application like Photoshop, can be used to facilitate the RGB to CMYK conversion, enabling accurate colour correction from the original RGB source, but you still need to make sure that your monitor is properly calibrated or else all of your hard work is wasted.

The basis of the suite is the Spyder colorimeter (suction cup device) and OptiCAL software, which provide precise tools for adjusting a monitor's calibration parameters. The software also include a wide choice of gamma and colour temperature targets, curve manipulation, monitor focus, geometry and uniformity checking utilities. OptiCAL includes colour control tools to help deliver precise, repeatable results in just a few steps. First, a pre-calibration utility tells you to reset your monitor to its factory defaults to balance your monitor's RGB guns before calibrating. Next, you then attach the Spyder colorimeter to the face of your monitor and click on the on-screen button marked calibrate. OptiCAL then does the rest. The entire calibration process takes around 5 minutes the first time, and about 3 minutes thereafter.

Extra software bundled with the suite include iCorrect Professional, a Photoshop plug-in that helps you to remove colour casts, set black and white points, alter brightness and contrast levels and provide global colour edits through 'memory colours', and EditLab, which lets you edit and create ICC profiles of your corrections to automatically apply to other images.

Links:
Colour Confidence Studio Web site
Pantone ColorVision Spyder Web site