[MarcAguileraBio] 

I am essentially lazy. I want to take great pictures at the start, then immediately go to print or the web with very little post production. That’s why I’m a digital purist and use color management to simplify my digital experience.

When I shot film, I looked for great light and always made sure I captured exposure that would produce a good negative or transparency. I was hard on myself if I had to rely on post processing to fix my mistakes. Even in the darkroom I liked to use the same few contrast filters for black and white printing. I was a film purist then and am a digital purist now.

As such, I have a mantra that really helps in dealing with digital imaging and printing: “Be Calibrated.”

Calibration is simply: To change the state of a device to conform to a known specification. It’s similar to a car tune up in which a mechanic checks how an engine is currently running, then makes the necessary changes to make the engine operate as it was designed to.

In the digital photographic workflow, I calibrate at every step. I calibrate my monitors with the Gretag Macbeth i1 to conform to a known luminance, gamma, and color temperature. When I shoot with my Nikon D200, I make sure I have calibrated to a known white point. I do this by setting a custom white point with a Gretag Macbeth White Balance Card.

Most importantly, when I print to my HP Designjet 130 and 90 I make sure that I use the “Automatic Closed Loop Color Calibration” feature on the printers. To see if there has been a drift in performance (which is a signal to re-calibrate), I send a copy of the test file shown here and compare it with a previous version. If the appearance of the colors has changed, I re-calibrate.

In every city in which I teach the Color without Limits seminar, one of the questions I hear most often is, “How often do I need to calibrate?” My answer is simple: “I re-calibrate only if I see a drift.”

A certain amount of drift occurs in all printers (and other digital color devices), no matter who makes them. Densities (and sometimes even hues) can change over time or when a new ink cartridge or printhead is installed.

It’s important to check for drift every time you set out to do a print run. Whenever I print, the first thing I do is print my test file. If it looks good, I am good to go. If it looks different than my last test print, I restart the calibration process.

Consistency is essential to managing color. Being calibrated means I can rest assured I will remain consistent.

The importance of being calibrated is that if I am calibrated, I have a better chance that my profile will produce satisfactory results.

Like I said, I am lazy. Really I am. I want to take great pictures and then make great prints with as little time in my digital darkroom as possible. So go on, be calibrated and I bet it will change your workflow forever.