Review: Color Confidence: The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Color Management

Color Confidence coverColor Confidence: The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Color Management by Tim Grey from Sybex cleared up a lot of questions for me. Now I feel confident about selecting a working space when bringing my digital photos into Photoshop. Now I understand a whole lot more about color profiles, Photoshop settings, and color settings for my camera, my monitor, my printer and my scanner.

Teachers of digital imaging, electronic publishing and photography classes will find this book a wonderful resource, and Web design teachers will find multiple uses for it as well.

It begins with an explanation of color itself. Then there is a detailed inspection of how to set up Photoshop with color settings, working spaces, profiles, gamut settings and other color-related information explained in most helpful depth. Even so, this isn’t a Photoshop book, despite the fact that a lot of what a photographer does with digital photos happens in Photoshop. Grey gives equal attention to selecting the best monitor and setting up a color profile for it, to selecting a scanner and setting up a color profile on it, and to how to select and configure a digital camera. He suggests utility programs and hardware that are helpful to the digital photographer throughout and give reasons why various adaptors, devices and software programs are useful to color management.

Grey explains color optimization and various output options depending on whether the image is destined for print, web, projection or e-mail. The final chapter is about workflow, and suggests workflows that will help the photographer achieve predictable output with several process specific workflows including web, e-mail and digital projection. In addition to an index, the book also contains a glossary.

Tim Grey has written other books about digital photography and teaches at the Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging.

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