Color Profiles

Managing color profiles within your images and when you view your images on a monitor or with a projector is critical to having a consistent experience.

Calibrate Monitors and Projectors

To display colors as originally defined within an image you must calibrate your display or projector. No device is perfect and each has it own limitations. The calibration will make a "best effort" at displaying an image.

Monitor and projector calibration is performed with a commercial product such as those from XRite (xrite.com).

Before calibrating your monitor and projector, brightness, contrast, and sharpness should be adjusted since they affect color rendition. You want to avoid highlight and shadow clipping. Your calibration software will provide instructions. Consider also searching the Internet for monitor and projector calibration.

Calibration is specific to a video adapter and monitor. When calibrating a projector, each screen used will also require calibration.

Image Profiles

You can use ICM color profiles within your images. When images are projected or displayed on a web page, however, they are converted to the sRGB color space. Some browsers do not support color profiles so the conversion to sRGB is necessary to display the images properly. Your expanded color space specified in your ICM profile is useful when making prints, but rarely can a monitor use the enhanced color space.

Images uploaded to your Visual Pursuits website may contain ICC color profiles and they will be handled properly. If no profile is present a sRGB profile is assumed.

When you prepare an image that will be displayed on a monitor or projector it may be helpful to "soft proof" the image in Photoshop to verify how it will display. This is because you may have a monitor with a large color gamut for editing in Photoshop, but your saved jpg file will be limited to sRGB. This can cause a shift in colors or contrast. In Photoshop, use the menu View, Proof Setup and select Monitor RGB. You can then toggle the proofing with the menu View, Proof Colors.