X-Rite and Pantone jointly announced and released a new colour management / colour measurement system with some innovative features. Two versions were released: ColorMunki Design and ColorMunki Photo.
Pantone sent me one of the first ColorMunki Design systems available. I’ll receive a ColorMunki Photo later on. The differences between the two systems are entirely attributable to the software. While the Design version focusses strongly on spot colour management, the Photo version focusses more on skin colours, black and white profiling and a completely new exchange model for photos.
ColorMunki Design is the first version I’m going to discuss here. The ColorMunki Design is a complete colour management and measurement system in a box. The measurement device is a spectrophotometer with a special industrial design and a synthetic cloth container. This protective cover acts as a protection for the measurement device and also as a counterweight for the instrument when calibrating and profiling a display. The cloth cover has a sort of heavy neck strap to carry the device around.
I have some criticism with regards to the protective cover. First of all, the ColorMunki device has a large rotating knob with a press button at one side. Both sides remain exposed, even when the ColorMunki is kept in its holder. The device being of sturdy plastic, I don’t believe it will break easily, but you will get scratches on the sides fairly rapidly, if you’re not careful.
The ColorMunki Spectrophotometer
The container acts as a holder for profiling a display. To that purpose, there’s a special hard-plastic compartment in the container with a hole that can be slid open or closed. The ColorMunki not always lines up properly without exerting some slight pressure until it settles on the display. As far as the holder is concerned, I love its design in terms of eye-candy, but while it’s not too bad in terms of usability, it could be better. To round up this part of the review, I also think X-Rite and Pantone should definitely rethink the whole box. In my opinion, people should be able to keep the ColorMunki in something that easily stores and can withstand some small abuse in handling.
The ColorMunki itself is a spectrophotometer which means it measures both emissive and reflective material. Indeed, with the ColorMunki you can measure a display, a projector, ambient light, and printed colour. I received the actual technical details from Pantone, and while I can’t disclose these I can tell you the ColorMunki—on paper, judging from the technical differences list—performs slightly worse than an Eye-One Pro. One thing that I can disclose is that ColorMunki is UV-Cut only, while the Eye-One Pro may be used in either UV-Cut or without filter mode.
The overall accuracy of the ColorMunki has a slightly worse average deltaE (differences measured between measurements taken) than the Eye-One Pro. Of course, technical data sheets are interesting, but it’s the practical result that counts. I performed a number of tests that showed the ColorMunki Design is certainly no toy, and its technical details may be less “pro” than those of the Eye-One Pro, the main difference really is in the versatility the Eye-One Pro offers. The ColorMunki is less versatile and more error-prone than the Eye-One Pro because of some of its industrial design (e.g. some angles of attack may cause errors with ColorMunki, and not with Eye-One Pro).
However, that doesn’t make ColorMunki a less capable device, simply because it’s intended to work only within the context of ColorMunki Design software. Before tackling the software, I would like to go back to the results for a moment. I expected the ColorMunki to be slightly worse at caibrating and profiling the monitor than a X-Rite DTP94 or even an Eye-One Display II. The latter two measurement devices are colorimeters, and colorimeters are better at measuring emissive light than spectrophotometers.
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Profiling displays and printers
That proved to be correct, but not the way I thought it would. When I calibrate my display using basICColor combined with a DTP94, the resulting calibration and profile give me a very large dynamic range. Especially the dark areas still carry a lot of detail. Also, the infamous Black Level test as described in Bruce Fraser’s Real World Colour Management (the bible on colour management) gives an excellent result with me only having to boost four levels upwards before the square becomes visible.
According to the late Bruce Fraser, most calibration systems will force you to open up the levels to at least level five before you’ll see the square, so basICColor—which truly calibrates your monitor—does a great job. I ran the same test with the ColorMunki display profiles and much to my surprise, the Black Level test gave the same result. On the three other tests that I ran, and which included an analysis using ColorThink Pro’s worksheet, the ColorMunki Design display profile was on par with the results form basICColor’s display 4.x.
The results were slightly different, but only slightly. I got these results because I left the monitor’s Lightness values unchanged. You can have ColorMunki Design calibrate and profile your display in two modes: Easy and Advanced. In the Easy mode, no adjustments are made to the monitor using its OSD (On-Screen Display) controls. In the Advanced mode, you can set Contrast and Lightness levels manually—if the monitor will let you.
ColorMunki Design supports all types of monitors, including DDC monitors such as certain types of Eizo monitors, where the calibration process involves adjusting the monitor hardware automatically. I couldn’t test ColorMunki Design with such high-end monitor, but on an older LaCie monitor, the results were as I described earlier—but only if I left the lightness in its default state, which is too high according to ColorMunki’s own assessment.
When I used ColorMunki’s advice and set the lightness level to what it required from me, the dark areas were much less detailed and the Black Level test faired one level worse. The lesson to be learned from this is that you should not thoughtlessly accept whatever a measurement system tells you, unless you’ve experimented before and found its advice to be spot-on. The software supports ambient light measurement as part of the display profiling process, as well as D50 and D65.
ColorMunki Design Software Supports Creative Process
Having established ColorMunki’s accuracy when it comes to display profiling, I went on and tested the device with printer profiles. A printer profile is created by printing a maximum of fifty to seventy patches. Only RGB printers—which include all inkjets, but exclude all RIPs—can be profiled. The ColorMunki system first generates a set of some thirty colour patches. These patches are huge when compared to other profiling software.
The software will guide you through the whole process, just as it does with display profiling. It will even show you a timer bar for drying the patches. When the drying time is over, you can start measuring the colour patches. To do that, you’ll have to get the ColorMunki out of its holder. Measuring is done by siding the ColorMunki over the patches. The size of the patches makes this a no-brainer process, with barely a risk of erroneous measurements.
When all patches have been scanned, the software will calculate a second test target and you will have to print and measure that one too. At the end of that measurement, the profile is created. The general purpose printer profiles generated by ColorMunki Design are as good as those created by ProfileMaker and the Eye-One Pro. The latter creates a profile that has a slightly larger gamut; however, I also compared the results to what I got with basICColor Print 3—Color Solutions’ new Print profiling software. This software is a bit more conservative in its profiles than other profiling software I have worked with. Not surprisingly, ColorMunki Design’s and Print 3’s profiles were almost an identical match.
In ColorMunki Design, you can take printer profile one step further. You can optimise an existing profile for printing specific spot colours. By dragging up to five colour patches into a window, you can optimise an existing profile for these five colours. To this effect, ColorMunki Design will generate one new test chart that you’ll have to print and measure. As with general purpose profiling, the whole process is guided.
When the process has finished, you can overwrite the existing profile, or save the optimised profile to a new file. When I examined an optimised profile that had been optimised for printing three tints of red, I noticed that ColorMunki Design will expand the gamut into the reds, but also into the opposite colour. I compared a print of the same logo output with the general purpose profile and with the optimised one.
The differences were subtle but visible. The optimised logo had slightly brighter reds, but I couldn’t see any difference in the blues. When I measured the colours with the Eye-One Pro to see if there would be any difference in Lab values, I concluded the colour shift wasn’t dramatic but nevertheless measurable. A deltaE of 1.9 points to a difference between the two logo reds that is barely visible, but still noticeable. The blue part of the logo showed no difference—the difference was less than deltaE 1.
With regards to the colour management (calibration and profiling) and measurement performance of the ColorMunki system, I am very impressed. I truly believe X-Rite / Pantone have a winner here. They have a winner not only because of the accuracy of the spectrophotometer and the software algorithms used, but also because of the way the software supports the creative process.
ColorMunki Design Targets Graphic and Layout Designers
When I started testing ColorMunki Design, I insisted on a short interview with the European Vice-President of Pantone Europe, Helmut Eifert. I wanted to know the target user group for this new system. The Pantone VP explained that ColorMunki Design was meant to be an iPod for colour. ColorMunki, he said, is meant to simplify colour management and make it a thoughtless process, while at the same time delivering colour palette support. That is why the software has video assistance throughout, and when colour measurements have to be done, the process is guided.
To these effects, ColorMunki Design integrates with creative applications. The ColorMunki Design software will—if you allow it—synchronise colour palettes that you create with applications such as InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPess. The software will show you which colours of your palettes will print on output devices that are described by profiles such as Euroscale FOGRA 27 or Web Coated SWOP, to name just two. This functionality is called PrintSafe.
The ColorMunki Design interface has a left column listing the Pantone colour Libraries (including Munsell Gossy, Goe System, etc), Resources (including iPhoto and Aperture Libraries, the Display and Printer Profiling buttons, and a Coloratti Collection), and Projects (which holds your own palette creations). The large centre window is where the palettes and images are shown, while the column at right gives you colour information, tags, colour harmonies, variations, and similar (as close as possible) spot colours from the Libraries. There’s also a Proofing panel below that area where you can choose to see which colours are safe to print on the printing presses such as FOGRA or SWOP and the Lighting environment in which you’re working (viewing Booth, D50, Daylight, etc).
Synchronising Palettes with Creative Suite and QuarkXPress
Except for sorting and searching for palettes (which works like any other search capability in Mac OS X—excellent) you can create palettes from photographs or other images (any TIFF, JPEG, PNG or BMP will do), just by dragging the colour patches from the centre window to one of your projects in the list. You can also create colour patches by using the ColorMunki spectrophotometer to measure a colour of any object surface.
Colour patches that you create yourself can be tagged so you can easily find them later. A special floating panel holds all patches that you select and somehow copy or move from one place to another. As soon as you’re happy with a palette you’ve created for a project, you can upload that palette to the design applications you have chosen to synchronise their colour swatches (or create new ones) with ColorMunki Design. The Mac OS X Color Picker is supported too, by the way.
ColorMunki Design will also automatically set application print settings in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and QuarkXpress, configuring the settings in the Print dialogues so they match the profile characteristics of the printer profile in ColorMunki Design. This “AppSet” feature can be turned on and off at will, but as far as I could see, this is one feature that doesn’t work well yet. For example, in the InDesign plug-ins folder, I could find a ColorMunki plug-in, but I couldn’t find an XTension in the QuarkXPress folder.
Even with the plug-in in place, I couldn’t find any difference between ordinary printing through a profile or ColorMunki AppSet printing—perhaps I’ve missed it, but no settings were changed. I did notice, however, that the InDesign plug-in was at version 0.9 beta, which might explain why nothing seemed to be happening…
Except for this small glitch, the ColorMunki Design software performed well and delivers sound added value in my opinion. It indeed makes colour management as simple as clicking. Its simplicity does not interfere with accuracy—most simple solutions to colour management turn out to be too simple at the results side as well. ColorMunki Design is an exception to this rule, both in terms of the measurement instrument and the associated software.
The software supports the creative process in more than way. It’s fun to use, it creates a colour workflow that is easy to understand and without much to set up. It enables its users to optimise for spot colours and create colour libraries and swatches with metadata so these colour libraries may still make sense months or even years after the project was finished. It will even work in Full SCreen mode.
ColorMunki Design will show you not just colour harmonies and colour variations, but also those spot colours that are closest to the colour patch you’re working with. To me, ColorMunki Design is a welcome innovative colour management system. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there is no room for improvement anymore, or that it’s perfect. The AppSet funtionality is unclear to me, and what is also unclear to me is why you should be content with only 12 colours being extracted from any image—even if you can clearly see more than a dozen different colours in there.
But ColorMunki Design is only at version 1, and so there’s plenty of time for X-Rite and Pantone to filter out the bugs and expand some features without necessarily adding to them. Whatever X-Rite or Pantone do with ColorMunki Design, I would hate to see it being upgraded and updated like ProfileMaker—an update every 6 months or so is fine with a high-end professional tool, but not with software that is clearly aimed at a much larger audience with a much more demanding attitude.
