Colour management

Microsoft Windows has this great feature called "Colour Management". Unfortunately, it's not switched on the vast majority of the time, so it's almost useless. Use Internet Explorer 8, or any of its precedents, and you won't be seeing images that are "colour managed" (use Firefox and associated plugin instead). Use the slide show in the picture viewer shipping with Vista and Windows 7, and your images will be equally unmanaged (ridiculously unnecessary bug). Just using the preview pane in Windows Explorer shows your images being rendered without care for their colour (staggeringly avoidable shortcoming). In short, "colour management" has been a great idea, but very badly executed in contemporary Windows operating systems. Sorry Microsoft, but you've been particularly rubbish in this respect.

Do you care? Should you care? Well, yes, and here's why.

The simplified dirty low-down is that images are generally stored in something called the "sRGB colour space". Pixel colours stored in an image are meant to produce very specific visual stimuli when viewed on an output device such a monitor, or paper when produced from a printer. You would expect to see the same image on all different types of equipment, after all, they will all have been produced from the same source file.

In order to make this happen in the real world, colours in your source images have to be "colour managed", or "converted" from their theoretical "sRGB colour space" into the nearest colours that an output device can physically produce. This should happen automatically in an ideal world, but it doesn't. This is why colour management is so essential.

However, colour management isn't magic and it needs information about your output devices to be able to work effectively. You will need what is known as a "colour profile", often referred to as an ICC or ICM profile for each of your devices. You then need to map those profiles to those devices in order for the colour management to be able to work at all. This is accomplished differently for different Windows operating systems so we won't go into detail about that here.

Once your operating system is correctly configured, when using Imagina, colour management can be switched on or off by simply using the View menu. In practice, the normal and high quality options both seem to perform with equal speed. In theory, they may well be quite different so we have given you provision for both.

Only switch colour management off if you absolutely do not require it. As an example of why, many new monitors being produced recently have a "colour gamut" that significantly outstrips the sRGB colour space. sRGB images displayed on these monitors seem to be particularly overbright in the red wavelengths without colour management. If you edit your pictures to look correct on such a monitor with colour management switched off then they may well look muted on other less-capable devices, and certainly when printed by a professional printer. In short, you will be stuffing your pictures when you think you're "correcting" them.

So, if you want your pictures to look good on your screen, and equally good when you send them off to be printed, then ensure that high quality colour management is switched on and you won't be disappointed.