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Color management is one of the last great hurdles that most photographers face in the transition from film to digital, and sadly, it's one of the biggest as well. The process of matching final printed work to an original subject has spawned countless tomes on the subject, and even more debates as to the right tools for the job.
It's not just that every single print method varies (they do) or that every monitor has its own color tendencies (they have). The tools necessary to produce accurate color are often cumbersome, expensive and poorly contrived. The result of many color-management purchases is a frustrated photographer, a pile of equipment in a closet and output that's no better than before the experiment began.
ColorVision's PrintFix Pro Suite is an all-in-one bundle from ColorVision that includes both the company's SpyderzPro monitor calibration and profiling device [Product Reviews, December 2004], and the Datavision 1005 Colorometer (used to measure printed output) from parent company Datacolor. (Datacolor is better known for their color management tools in industries such as paint and textiles.) The suite also includes both the Spyder2Pro software for monitor profiling and the PrintFix software for creating accurate profiles for output devices.
The idea is simple: combine an easy-to-use monitor calibrator with a high-quality printer patch reader and powerful but simple-to-use software and allow the photographer to create monitor and printer profiles with the press of a button. (Or, in the case of the printer profiler, many presses, as we'll get to shortly.)
The combination, priced at a reasonably affordable $649, for the most part succeeds brilliantly. It's an easy-to-use combination of hardware and software that delivers what it promises, at the cost of a bit of repetitive finger fatigue.
SCREEN TEST
The challenge of color management is this: every device that creates color does so differently, and the human eye-the target of that output-is almost utterly useless at interpreting subtle variations in that color. The mind sees what it wants to see.
To ensure that monitors and printers are creating color correctly, it's imperative to precisely measure their output and compare it to the colors they're supposed to be creating. This multi-step process (output a...