ColorSync

14.8. ColorSync As you may have discovered through painful experience, computers arent great with color.
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ColorSync14.8. ColorSyncAs you may have discovered through painful experience, computers arent great withcolor. Each device you use to create and print digital images sees color a little bitdifferently, which explains why the deep amber captured by your scanner may berendered as chalky brown on your monitor, yet come out as a fiery orange on your Epsoninkjet printer. Since every gadget defines and renders color in its own way, colors areoften inconsistent as a print job moves from design to proof to press.ColorSync attempts to sort out this mess, serving as a translator between all the differentpieces of hardware in your workflow. For this to work, each device (scanner, monitor,printer, digital camera, copier, proofer, and so on) has to be calibrated with a uniqueColorSync profile—a file that tells your Mac exactly how it defines colors. Armed withthe knowledge contained in the profiles, the ColorSync software can compensate for thevarious quirks of the different devices, and even the different kinds of paper they printon.Most of the people who lose sleep over color fidelity are those who do commercial colorscanning and printing, where off colors are a big deal. After all, a customer mightreturn a product after discovering, for example, that the actual product color doesntmatch the photo on a companys Web site.14.8.1. Getting ColorSync ProfilesColorSync profiles for many color printers, scanners, and monitors come built into MacOS X. When you buy equipment or software from, say, Kodak, Agfa, or Pantone, youmay get additional profiles. If your equipment didnt come with a ColorSync profile, visitProfile Central (www.chromix.com), where hundreds of model-specific profiles areavailable for downloading. Put new profiles into the Library ColorSync Profilesfolder. GEM IN THE ROUGH The Coolest Feature? Deep in the ColorSync Utility program beats one of the coolest Mac OS X features that no-bodys ever discovered. On the Profiles tab, you can click the name of a color-device profile and view a lab plot of its gamut (the colors its capable of displaying). What you might not realize, however, is that this is a 3-D graph; you can drag its corners to spin it in space. But thats not the cool part. The tiny triangle in the corner of the graph is a pop- up menu. If you choose Hold for comparison and then choose a different color profile, youll see both lab plots superimposed, revealing the spectrum areas where they overlap—and the yawning gaps where they cant display the same colors. Youll find out, among other things, that some printers cant display nearly as many colors as your monitor can, and that inkjets are much better at depicting, say, cyan than green. And while were discussing features you might have missed: You can double- click a profiles name to view a dizzyingly complex scientific description of its elements. Blue colorant tristimulus, anyone?14.8.2. Default ProfilesIn professional graphics work, a ColorSync profile is often embedded right in a photo,making all this color management automatic. Using the ColorSync Utility program (inApplications Utilities), you can specify which ColorSync profile each of your gadgetsshould use. Click the Devices button, open the category for your device (scanner, camera,display, printer, or proofer), click the model you have, and use the Current Profile pop-upmenu to assign a profile to it.Tip: In the Displays pane of System Preferences, youll find a Color tab. Its Calibratebutton is designed to create a profile for your particular monitor in your particular officelighting—all you have to do is answer a few fun questions onscreen and drag a fewsliders.14.8.3. More on ColorSyncIf you ache to learn more about ColorSync, you wont find much in Mac OS Xs Helpsystem. Instead, search the Web. At www.apple.com/colorsync, for example, youll findarticles, tutorials, and links. Going to a site like www.google.com and searching forColorSync is also a fruitful exercise.