Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

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14.8. ColorSync

As you may have read elsewhere in this book ”or discovered through painful experience ”computers aren't great with color. Each device you use to create and print digital images "sees" color a little bit differently, which explains why the deep amber captured by your scanner may be rendered as chalky brown on your monitor, yet come out as a fiery orange on your Epson inkjet printer. Since every gadget defines and renders color in its own way, colors are often inconsistent as a print job moves from design to proof to press.

ColorSync attempts to sort out this mess, serving as a translator between all the different pieces of hardware in your workflow. For this to work, each device (scanner, monitor, printer, digital camera, copier , proofer, and so on) has to be calibrated with a unique ColorSync profile ”a file that tells your Mac exactly how it defines colors. Armed with the knowledge contained in the profiles, the ColorSync software can compensate for the various quirks of the different devices, and even the different kinds of paper they print on.

Most of the people who lose sleep over color fidelity are those who do commercial color scanning and printing, where "off" colors are a big deal. After all, a customer might return a product after discovering, for example, that the actual product color doesn't match the photo on a company's Web site.

POWER USERS' CLINIC

AppleScript and ColorSync

Using AppleScript, described in Chapter 8, you can harness ColorSync in elaborate ways. Just by dragging document icons onto AppleScript icons, for example, you can embed ColorSync profiles, modify the profiles already incorporated, remove profiles, review the profile information embedded in a graphic, and much more. Better yet, you don't even have to know AppleScript to perform these functions ”just use the built-in AppleScripts that come with Mac OS X.

To find them, open the Library ColorSync Scripts folder. Unfortunately, there aren't any instructions for using these 18 ready-made AppleScripts. Nonetheless, Apple's real hope is that these example scripts give you a leg up on creating your own AppleScripts ”that someday you, the print shop operator, will be able to automate your entire color processing routine using AppleScript and ColorSync.

14.8.1. Getting ColorSync Profiles

ColorSync profiles for many color printers, scanners , and monitors come built into Mac OS X. When you buy equipment or software from, say, Kodak, Agfa, or Pantone, you may get additional profiles. If your equipment didn't come with a ColorSync profile, visit Profile Central (www.chromix.com), where hundreds of model-specific profiles are available for downloading. Put new profiles into the Library ColorSync Profiles folder.

14.8.2. Default Profiles

In professional graphics work, a ColorSync profile is often embedded right in the photo, making all of this automatic. Using the ColorSync Utility program (in Applications Utilities), you can specify which ColorSync profile each of your gadgets should use. Click the Devices button, open the category for your device (scanner, camera, display, printer, or proofer), click the model you have, and use the Current Profile pop-up menu to assign a profile to it.

Tip: In the Displays pane of System Preferences, you'll find a Color tab. Its Calibrate button is designed to create a profile for your particular monitor in your particular office lighting ”all you have to do is answer a few fun questions onscreen and drag a few sliders.
GEM IN THE ROUGH

The Coolest Tiger Feature?

Deep in the ColorSync Utility program beats one of the coolest Tiger features that nobody's ever discovered.

On the Profiles tab, you can click the name of a color-device profile and view a lab plot of its gamut (the colors it's capable of displaying). What you might not realize, however, is that this is a 3-D graph; you can drag its corners to spin it in space.

But that's not the cool part. The tiny triangle in the corner of the graph is a pop-up menu. If you choose "Hold for comparison" and then choose a different color profile, you'll see both lab plots superimposed, revealing the spectrum areas where they overlap ”and the yawning gaps where they can't display the same colors.

you'll find out, among other things, that some printers can't display nearly as many colors as your monitor can, and that inkjets are much better at depicting, say, cyan than green.

And while we're discussing features you might have missed: you can double-click a profile's name to view a dizzyingly complex scientific description of its elements.

14.8.3. More on ColorSync

If you ache to learn more about ColorSync, you won't find much in Mac OS X's Help system. Instead, search the Web. At www.apple.com/colorsync, for example, you'll find articles, tutorials, and links. Going to a site like www.google.com and searching for ColorSync is also a fruitful exercise.

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