Eddie Tapp is an award-winning photographer and an author and teacher on digital imaging. He wrote the excellent “Practical Color Management” for O’Reilly. Tapp also wrote “Photoshop Workflow Setups”, “Controlling Color and Tone in Photoshop”, and “Professional Production Techniques”. In Practical Color Management, he explains in a simple to understand language how to best set up a colour management workflow that works for photographers and designers.

Tapp starts the book with a history of colour management, which is rare, but helps to explain a lot about today’s colour management technologies. As soon as history has had its rights, the author goes on with business as usual. He explains the difference between calibration and profiling , and explains the jargon used by colour consultants, such as “PCS”, “CMM”, “colour space”.

The book is divided into two main sections: at first, you’ll get the basic technologies explained, but with chapter 4, the practical issues get Tapp’s attention. It is here that you’ll learn how to set the stages of colour management, which involves the practical work of profiling, selecting a Colour Management Module, etc. Tapp also answers questions that do not directly belong to the realm of colour management, but are important when using colour management nevertheless. The question when to use JPEG and when RAW, for example.

Or the issue of how sharpening a photograph may interfere with colour pixels. Finally, the author discusses the output of colour managed content. He covers the web — also a topic that gets to be forgotten by other authors — as well as printers and RIPs. The icing on the cake is Tapp’s explanation of how profiles work and how to edit them, and how and when to create custom profiles for output devices yourself.

Tapp uses GretagMacbeth and X-Rite equipment throughout this book, with a slight preference for X-Rite’s equipment. As GretagMacbeth has been taken over by X-Rite, but the equipment of GretagMacbeth (largely) has been chosen above that of X-Rite, you may have to think twice when following some examples.