Philip

You’ve probably read about how I was going to ship a ColorMunki in, I got my ColorMunki Photo shipped in from USA about a week ago from some friendly eBayers who were able to ship direct from USA to Australia, bringing the price down to about $450 Au instead of RRP $700.

If you’re not aware, the ColorMunki is a spectrophotometer so it is able to measure the intensity of different wavelengths of light (ie, colour) and generally more accurate than the cheaper tristimulus colorimeters which is why they’re used more frequently when accuracy is necessary.

The ColorMunki is able to measure ambient light, projected light, CRT/LCD output as well as take spot or swipe colour samples using its own inbuilt light source. It also includes its own white tile for self-calibration! Pretty good for a device that looks like a large tape measure and runs all off USB! You can check the official web site here.

The ColorMunki... looks like a large tape measure!

You pretty much get the ColorMunki, a semi-enclosed weighted pouch, a CD that links to the real installer and a USB cable in the box. Interestingly enough there’s a maximum (but not enforced) limit of 3 activations for the ColourMunki, so if you were thinking of installing the software on multiple computers and jump the hardware from computer to computer probably not a good idea if the activations are enforced. Software install wise it’s pretty easy - simply pop the CD in, download the updated application software and install.

Calibrating your Monitor

Calibrating your monitor involves letting it warm up for about 1/2 hour to an hour before letting ColourMunki at it, since most monitors change colour from when they are cold to when they are warmer. The ColorMunki software leads you through setting the brightness and contrast, measuring ambient light and setting the white point, then takes a number of samples, then builds and installs a profile to calibrate your monitor. You use the pouch to gently lean the ColorMunki against the display and then use the weighted strap to keep it in place.

ColorMunki ready to calibrate a display

Once this is done you generally recalibrate the monitor once a month (or more frequently, depending on how important it is to you) to handle changes in the monitor’s colour output as it ages.

Comparing LCD’s - Dell vs Apple

Part of the interesting thing about calibrating monitors is that you can get an idea about the colour gamut that the screen supports. Different devices such as printers, projectors and screens can display a different range of colours or gamut. The better the display, the larger the gamut. Using the ColorSync Utility on Mac OS X lets you quickly view the difference between my Dell monitor and the MacBook Pro LCD LED display.

Dell 2405FPW vs Apple MBP LCD LED

As you can see, the white outline shows the gamut of the Dell, while the coloured section inside is the gamut of the MBP. The Dell pretty much wins hands down over the MBP with a slight exception that the MBP is a bit better on blues.

Calibrating Printers

Now comes the exciting (and long and tedious) part where you can use the ColourMunki to calibrate your printer. The ColorMunki software simply prints out an uncorrected set of 50 patches which are then scanned by sliding the ColorMunki over the patches in order, then the software generates a second set of 50 patches which you scan in again. After this is done, a profile is made that you can use in PhotoShop, GraphicConverter, ColorSync or other software to enable the picture to be printed correctly. You can also input another set of 50 patches to tailor your profile to the kinds of photos you’re likely to print, the ColorMunki software can revise the profile from existing samples.

ColorMunki scanning patches... 100 or 150 to do!

You need to calibrate your printer pretty much whenever you:

1) Change paper (quite likely)
2) Change ink/toner brands (less likely)
3) Change print configurations and settings (usually done once, then fixed)

Different papers respond differently and require different printing techniques, generally the better the paper the better the gamut the ink can represent onto the paper. I picked up a stack of Canon glossy paper for photo prints, some matte photo paper as well as some high resolution paper so I have a good range to play with now.

Comparing Profiles and Devices

The ColorSync Utility with Mac OS X is quite useful in seeing what the profile can handle, so it’s good to be able to compare different profiles to see their respective qualities easily.

ColorMunki Profile vs Canon Profile

The above is a snapshot of my calibrated ColorMunki profile vs the provided Canon PIXMA iP4500 profile for my photo paper, so you can see there’s improved gamut in the blue, red and yellow ranges but some losses in the green and purple ranges, so I’ll have to check my settings to see if they can be improved.

Photo Paper vs Dell 2405

The above is also the Photo paper vs the Dell. From what you can see, the photo paper has improved gamut for green and blue but has less gamut for red and purple. Standard Reflex paper has a very restricted gamut, since the dye tends to soak through the paper rather than into the paper correctly.

Problems with Printer Profiles and Printing

I’ve been reading about the whoas and woes of various people who bought the ColorMunki. Most people seem pretty happy about it, with the occasional complaint of “it produces trashed profiles” abounding. Some recent work that I did to set up the profiles shows a staggering amount of shortcomings in the process that needs to be fixed at the OS, application and driver level.

Problem 1: Drivers are not forthcoming about which profile is being used. They like to use nice names like GL#, MP#, PR# or SP# or other esoteric names. If you want to install a new ColorSync profile, you need to be able to match the profile name to the paper name, which is usually custom by the printer manufacturer and assumes all paper bought will be theirs.

So, if you want profiles to work with ColorSync you need to shoehorn them into the driver’s existing profile to paper selection. This needs to go in favor of properly named profiles that work more in line with Printer to Paper to Ink/Settings level, not some esoteric other way. People think paper types, like “Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl”, not some wierd name that you have to hope to match to the paper name. Being able to define your own paper types + matching profile should be stock standard for any driver these days.

Problem 2: Drivers not switching off colour management properly. Sometimes, the driver switches colour management on even when you don’t want it to. Drivers need to respect presets that say, “no colour management”. You need to double and triple check all your settings before doing calibration, since the driver will assume you’re an idiot and that you really do want colour management when you don’t.

Problem 3: Applications doing their own ad-hoc colour management. After the mess of the OS and driver, some applications like PhotoShop or GraphicsConverter do their own colour management, which when coupled with maybe-maybe-not driver you can get doubled up colour management which throws everything out the window. A clear colour management path needs to be shown from input, application, OS, driver and then printer.

Maybe we’ll get it right someday… I think most people just want to calibrate a set of inks with a set of settings (fine, super fine, fast) and set of papers and use that. They hope. From what I read, most people with issues with the ColorMunki probably are using bad drivers or drivers that are doing too much and interfering.

Photo ColorPicker

A cool app that comes with the ColorMunki is the Photo ColorPicker. This lets you access the ColorMunki to do spot or strip measurements which can then be inspected in L*a*b or sRGB formats, as well as export to various file formats, probably the most useful being CSV which includes L*a*b information as well as 36 different nM intensity values which you could probably analyse later on. Currently I’m using this to get access to values to try running through Argyll which may be able to fine tune some printer profiles for me.

Printer Results

I managed to get some printed photos out for some friends to check out, they noticed a significant improvement in printed output now that the printer is calibrated. Previously, photos came out over saturated and unrealistic. Now, they are spot on very close to what is viewed on my monitor and what was seen in real life. For example, a photo of the water at a beach looks green now rather than the awful unrealistic blue that it was previously.

Conclusions

Highly recommended. If you do quite a few prints using your own gear at home, you definitely want to invest in a ColorMunki. I’ll update this in a few days with more info as I play around with it.