Lightweight Photography is not just about using lightweight cameras, sometimes it’s about using streamlined processes to make life easier or about tools that can fulfil more than one function and so lighten your load. I have just made one such purchase and I want to share my experience with you. The tool in question is the “ColorMunki Photo” which I’m sure many of you will know about and perhaps a few of you own this.
The ColorMunki provides a simple and fast way to profile your monitor so you can be sure the colours in your images are being accurately represented on the screen. It also allows you to profile your printer (the main reason for my purchase) as well as profiling cameras and LCD projectors. The later will come in useful where I give presentations to camera clubs and often run into issues with my images projecting too dark.
My previous approach to colour management was to use the” i-One” monitor profiler from X-Rite (who also make the ColorMunki). In comparison to the ColorMunki the “i-One” takes much longer to complete the profile and isn’t as user friendly. For printer profiles I tended to use either custom made profiles purchasing from a remote profiling service or sometimes made my own using VueScan and a desktop scanner. The first option is time consuming as you need to rely on the postal service whilst the second option wasn’t really reliable. Since I switched to using a Canon Pixma 9500MkII I have struggled to generate good profiles and if I’m truthful, gave up.
My experience of the ColorMunki is that it performs the two functions above (monitor and printer profiling) brilliantly. It’s very fast, easy to use and the results are fantastic. My printer seems to be using less ink but more importantly the results seem to be much more vivid. Prints I had previously thought were good seem to have just come to life with the new printer profiles I have generated. The profiles also seem much better than the generic profiles you can usually download from paper manufacturer sites. To say I am delighted is an understatement and I wanted to share this positive experience with everyone.
The Lightweight Photographer 
I have been using Colormunki for at least a year now & have discovered a couple of things:
1. You have to ensure that you calibrate your monitor when the ambient light is exactly the same as it was when you did the previous calibate. If you do not then you will get drastically different results. In my office I now have a daylight bulb which I put on at anytime (day or night) when I calibrate.
2. The more times that you calibrate monitor & printer the results from the calibration get better & better.
I was not aware that you can use Colormunki to calibrate a camera. I will have to take a look how that is done.
Hi Paul,
Yes very valid comments. I swear by daylight bulbs and can’t believe more people dont buy them. I have been reprofiling my printer a few times with some of the common papers I use. I built and then enhanced a set of profiles for colour and a second set for black and white and yes, they do improve. This is a very impressive tool.
The camera calibration might be a recent thing and doesn’t actually use the munki. The box arived with a small 24 swatch colour checker for which you can download the profiling software for free from the ColorMunki website. It seems to be a simple version of the Colour Passport Checker.
I will post an update once I have had the chance to get my head around it.
Regards
Robin