Color Management in Windows Vista: Push-Starting a Nuclear Reactor
Feb 11th, 2008 by Leo Geis
Windows Color Management is in a sort of adolescence. If you are using Vista and/or in the process of learning Color Management, you’ll need to spend an hour or two here. The relatively small investment of time will pay handsome rewards. Trust me.
During the 2008 Professional Aerial Photographers Association International Conference in Redondo Beach (2/08) there were a few questions that indicated a review of Color Management as Microsoft sees it.
This post is dedicated to my very dear friends Charlotte (Kirkpatrick) and Dawn Luesse, sisters who have spent the last 35 years defying any sort of limits on how wonderful human beings can become.
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Microsoft pages you’ll need to review concerning Color Management Basics:
So…what does it all mean to professional aerial shooters?
Actual screen capture of a crime in progress. “Just Say No!” to ICM in PhotoShop.
The best dissertation on WCS I have run across is in the ChromixColorNews #26. It’s detailed and lengthy, but if you’re to this point on this particular post, you’re probably a color pro or very disturbed in some other dimension/s-Steve Upton’s explanation will give you a good buzz.
I haven’t run any experiments on conversion accuracy in ICM or ACE vs. WCS.
Another issue that surfaced within various conversations-profiling multiple monitors in XP. Check here for the software. To profile dual monitors in Vista I believe you’ll need two LUT’s, meaning dual video cards. I still run AGPx8 systems, and have two setups for my main workstation:
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Matrox Parhelia 512 AGP and Matrox P650 PCI running dual 1680×1050 LCD’s and a 1600×1200 CRT (only one of the LCD’s is color managed);
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NVidia Quadro FX 3000 AGP and NVidia GeForce FX 5500 PCI running dual CRT’s, for speedier OpenGL work (on the FX3000 only!), since the Quadro only has single CLUT. I don’t recommend softmodding the GeForce AGP’s to emulate Quadros…always have to say that…
Of course, if the monitors themselves apply your profiles (certian Eizo and NEC models), the video card’s LUT is obviated.
As far as I know (2/08) Vista is still unloading CMS configurations (i.e. video card calibrations from the video card’s driver) to display certain administrative dialogues. That makes about as much sense as push-starting a nuclear reactor.
L