Just to drive a point to photographer’s out there…how important is colour management in Photography Post Processing? Very Important I would say. I stumbled this by chance when my Dell notebook went kaput and had to be sent in for repairs, so I had to rely on my company’s computer with CRT monitor to do my work. Surprisingly, when I navigated to my website, the CRT monitor showed a more natural rendition of colours on my photo compared to my notebook and I was already wondering why was the case? Painstakingly, I looked for answers during evenings and I was quite dumbfounded that some of the pro’s mentioned that our monitors (or most monitors) out there are not displaying correct colour and colour temperature. The reason for this is that, at lower colour temperature (9000 kelvins and above) the supposedly white would look very bright to the human eye and there is no way we can ever discover that there is actually a blue cast appearing on photos if side by side comparisons on colour temperature output aren’t made. Hence we tend to over compensate by post processing which made things even worse.
After gathering some info on what is ‘supposed’ to be correct, I reset my CRT to a cooler (or higher) colour temperature of 6500 Kelvin just to see what the effect would be. I was actually quite surprised that my photos turned out to be very natural and this is what I had aspired to see all along. Incidentally, I compared another monitor which had a setting of 9300 Kelvin and was surprised that there is a blue cast appearing on the monitor while my photos looked ‘odd’ under those circumstances.
Setting the correct colour temperature and colour in the monitor alone is inadequate, it is important that you need to enable your internet browser to display correct colours too and that is by enabling colour management within web browsers. Currently, only Safari V2.0 and FireFox V3.0 above can be enabled with colour management to display correct colours. For Internet Explorer, I doubt there is such a thing (they are not good at rendering HTML codes too).
I was lucky that my photos turned out to be ‘colour correct’ in my case because within the PhotoShop, I enabled colour management to display colour using sRGB profile which I would think most web browsers and monitors are displaying today. Although it is by far perfect (Adobe RGB Wide Gamut is really beautiful), it is still the only medium where your photos would ‘look’ correct in most monitors and with the increase in use of the internet to display images, it is even more important to get your photos colour managed.