Where Real World Color Management is the standard for the theory and the technical intricacies of colour management, this book is the standard for step-by-step colour management as it is applied in various applications.

Color Management for Photographers covers the colour management workflow that photographers are bound to be confronted with in Photoshop and other image editing applications. It was published in August 2005, and discusses the background of colour management, but goes deep into how you should apply colour management when working in different software environments.

Andrew Rodney is well-known among colour management enthusiasts. He owns The Digital Dog, a digital imaging training and consulting business, and he is founding member of Pixel Genius. Rodney therefore is the best man to explain how you should work with colour management in different applications, environments, and workflows. The Focal Press book we’re discussing here comes with a tutorial and software CD-rom for Windows and Mac.

Rodney starts out with explaining the basics of colour management and colour theory, but very quickly moves on to Photoshop workflows and ChromiX profile checking. In other words, this book does presume some basic knowledge of colour management by the reader. After his short intro, Rodney goes on with profiling. He explains why and how you should create profiles for a monitor, a scanner, digital camera, and printer.

Focusing on the Hows, he covers MonacoProfiler, ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.x, Digital ColorCheckers, Eye-One Match, Fuji Colourkit, etc, etc. It’s amazing which software and hardware combinations the author has managed to cover in this book, and if you own one of these systems, you are sure to find out how you should use them in order to get to their full potential.

Rodney also spends an entire chapter on printing press profiling. He does so because professional photographers will at some time in their professional life run against problems with press colour management. Contradictory to Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting in real World Color Management, Rodney doesn’t discuss the usefulness of creating profiles for a printing press. He just shows you how to do it and what to expect from it.

The last chapters in the book contain tutorials on what has been covered before. This makes the book valuable in two “directions”: you could use it as a tutorial, but it is also a reference work that should be kept within reach.