Well-known color photographer Eric Meola resisted color management at first. It was in the late 1980’s and although the digital revolution wasn’t truly underway yet, Eric was scanning a lot of his images. Color management at that time was complicated and added to the already high expense of scanning and processing.
“I sort of resisted,” he admits, “in fact it’s safe to say I most definitely resisted. For example, I would make a print and then thought I could simply make it more magenta or whatever to solve the problem. Of course it’s not so easy. There can be dozens of adjustments you need to make to get from here to there.”
The final straw was watching a presentation by Seth Resnick. The first thing Seth did was profile his projector. Eric asked if he did that before every show and the answer, of course, was a resounding “yes.”
“I had agreed to give a presentation,” Eric continues, “and after seeing four or five of my images on the screen I wanted to stop and go home. They were terrible! I quickly taught myself how to profile the projector with the X-Rite i1XTreme.
Eric has published three books showing his work, the last being about India.
“It’s a very color-intensive book,” he explains, “and everyone involved had to be on the same page, at zero so to speak. And that can only come with successful calibration and profiling. If nothing else, you have to at least do the monitors.”
Early on printers and publishers would ask for a match print, but that has been replaced by a more accurate and easier-to-use color management approach like ColorMunki or i1.
“If you’re not concerned about color management – and you’re shooting color – you might as well be shooting black and white,” says Eric.