For prints and photography, how much colour management kit do you need? When's it wasting your money 

More Cooper Common Sense! As a retired engineer with no aspirations to be “professional,” (i.e., sell my time or photos), I’m intrigued as much in getting the best results for my own satisfaction, as in getting the “perfect” composition. That makes me a target for anyone promising automatic “best” results. I continue to learn especially on your channel because it has common sense observations that keep proving to be true, at least for me. In this video, you point out that printer profiles don’t make a picture look the same across papers, but simply as good as they can. In a much earlier video you expressed your guarded skepticism over soft proofing, that there is no substituting “hard proofing” and looking at the results. I bought one online course promising better prints through soft proofing and I should have spent that money on more ink and paper! I’m sure I’m not the only amateur who is tempted to spend more money than it is worth to get “automatic” best results. I realize now that even buying my own expensive spectrometer won’t achieve that. Just think how much paper and ink I could get for that savings!

This is gold. Thanks so much, Keith. It's so easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of buying more and more gear and... not seeing much improvement. I now have more clarity of what I need.

Looking forward to hearing what you think about the Fuji, Keith. I enjoy how you explain the colour management stuff, makes sense which is an achievement based on what else I have seen and read.

Very sensible take on colour management requirements for the average photographer. Looking forward to your evaluation on the Fuji, especially anything relevant to art repro.

As always very informative. I have a i1 Studio and use it with Argyle CMS for both screen and print profiling. For me, and my skills are significantly less than yours, one big benefit to profiling paper is it makes it much easier for my untrained eye to see the real differences. I will in a sample pack profile one page and print a test imate on the other, this gives me the best ability to compare papers. I also find that when working with paper profiles, it makes it much easier to play with multiple papers, I can easily print an image on several papers and compare the results. The profiles deal with the technical details. It is possible to use much less colour management, the first time when scanning film negatives, I profiled the scanner and film but not the screen. In an wet darkroom there would be even less colour management but I've only done black and white darkroom work. For an amateur lacking the time and skills you have to commit to photography, profiling gives me the ability to play with other dimensions, paper choice etc. And it reduces the number of prints I need to do to get a good one. Without profiling, I'd stick to one or two papers and learn them and my screen better.

I've done camera sensor specific profiles for only a couple of shoots in the past. Both of these were in an industrial situation where all the staff were wearing bright orange, yellow, green and even pink dayglow high viz vests which needless to say would confuse the WB of any camera system. Worked well and made editing a lot easier. Other than that I'm happy just to sample the 18% grey patch on my color checker passport in LR and just sync the WB to the photos I took in the same lighting for general shooting situations. ☺️

Thank you.

Ooh exciting new camera to try 😃 I hope we don't all get GAS. Another great video, thanks Keith. I profiled my Canon R because I didn't like the colours it produced, however I later found out it may well have been to do with Lightroom. I had sold the camera by then and moved to Photolab... and have never profiled one since.

Thanks for this great informative video Keith. I was currently struggling to create profiles for my new Pro-300 using the Spyder Print and whichever target I tried, the results were worse than the ICC profiles form the paper manufacturer. In the past I've used this device for making profiles for my Pixma-8500 and my Pro-1 and there I had improvements. Maybe the spectrometer is outdated and I was intending to buy a new one, but your exposé reassured me not to spend extra money on it.

Hi Keith, thanks for this interesting video. I have been using a color monkey photo for years (8-9 years) and wonder how long it measures reliably. Reliable for me as an amateur photographer. And beside that, I bought the recommended book Bruce Fraser's 'Real World Color Management' which is very interesting for me. Thanks for that advice!

Thank you Keith, nice video! I have to look up how to correctly use the gray patch for white balancing, any link do comes to your mind?

Hi Keith Thanks for your videos! i learned a lot from them. I have a canon pixma pro 200 and i kindly wanna ask you: how can i print a bright and light pink (kind of neon pink). Can you maybe do a video about color settings and how to print this bright colors, which should be possible with the 8 colors :)?

I live in fens and at the moment I spend time at Sandringham and everything is greener than a green thing plays havoc with my old 1D so need a card.

Good morning Keith. Thanks for the always interesting videos. Could you tell me what model is your HP that you have on the table in this video? Thanks in advance

I recently bought the Calibrite PROFILER software to use with my Xrite iOne Display Pro but it won't work, crashes, with the 27" iMac GB-LED. The LED used on iMac 4K 21.5″, 4.5K 24″, 5K 27″ Retina displays in and after late 2015. This of course is not disclosed until after you've bought the software.

Tomorrow - WooHoo!

I'm using an inexpensive 43" 4k television as my monitor. Is there any chance of establishing a color profile for it (I have access to a spyderx pro)?

Will the ColorChecker Studio work with an Epson ET-16550 printer (4 color - black, magenta, cyan, and yellow pigment inks)?

Do you use Calibrite or BenQ palettemaster calibration software on your BenQ monitor?

Good luck with the fuji