By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, January 29, 2007 - 1:54:00
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http://www.basiccolor.de
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You don’t know much about colour management, you really don’t care about the theory, but you do want accurate RGB output from your printer? Welcome to basICColor dropRGB. Your knowledge about colour management can be as limited as knowing how to control a measurement device using basICColor catch and dropping the measurement file on dropRGB. The result is a nice RGB profile for your printer that will be more then good enough for most users.

Most colour management applications assume you’ve first learned the basics of colour management and perhaps a bit more than just the basics. In my book, that’s pretty understandable. Colour management has been much improved since the International Color Consortium (ICC) got involved in developing the system we know today, and which is based on ICC colour profiles. 

But the theory behind colour management is firmly rooted in the theory of how humans perceive light and how light interacts with objects (and which effect that in turn has on the human visual system). If you lack the basic understanding of how that works, you simply can’t understand why you should need profiles in the first place. Most graphic designers, photographers, and desktop publishers won’t be that ignorant. We all know we need some way to get all those digital devices we use to output colour to agree on how the colour we have in our mind should look when output.

Little Colour Management Knowledge Required

But why would you have to know anything about the ICC’s system except for the fact that a profile needs to sit in a particular folder on your system? And why would you be forced to make decisions about colour representation when all you want is an accurate colour representation in as large a colour space as your device will handle? The answer is: there is no need. Microsoft and Canon have teamed up to turn that answer into what they believe to be the colour management system of the future. Their solution is to forget about ICC profiling altogether, and be locked in into their “solution”.

That solution will probably not work for printers who have to deal with more than RGB, but some say it will not work for RGB workflows either. And you really shouldn’t have to understand colour management to a deep level in order to be able to work with it efficiently, and with much success when it comes to colour output. Color Solutions proves this with dropRGB and basICColor catch. To start with the last element of the workflow chain: dropRGB simply requires you to drag a measurement file on top of a window.

Behind the scenes, dropRGB will create the ICC profile for you. It will make some intelligent assumptions about your printer and will churn out a decent profile that complies with the standards and is nowhere inferior to profiles created with more difficult to use applications like ProfileMaker or MonacoProfiler. One of the reasons why that is so, is that dropRGB is one application tailored to one specific task: outputting a RGB colour profile. ProfileMaker and MonacoProfiler both are developed so you can do a lot more with them: from creating monitor profiles to profiling high-end multi-colour printing presses.

dropRGB doesn’t enable you to fine-tune the profile you are creating, but it is not aimed at markets where people will want to do that. On the other hand, and as you can see from one of the screenshots I took using ColorThink’s graphic profile representation, the gamut assumption applied by dropRGB is more conservative than what I managed to get out of an admittedly much bigger target file using ProfileMaker Pro. 

For one-on-one comparisons I should really create a profile using dropRGB that has as many patches as the one I created with ProfileMaker Pro. But given the limited ways in which can fine-tune RGB profiles anyway, I’ll make that comparison when I will be discussing CMYKick, which is another drag-and-drop profiling application by Color Solutions.

Would I recommend dropRGB? Yes, I would, and especially so to people who want to create good profiles quickly, with the least of hassle and knowledge requirement.