hi, newbie here to the forum. After years of using PS at work, I am so relieved to NOT have to use it at home for my Pro work–what a bloated overrated whale that thing has become.
While I have picked up Aperture pretty fast, and love it, I'd like to hear what many of you think about monitor/printer calibration software that works well with Macs and Aperture. There are so many differing opinions out there regarding products, my head is spinning. Willing to spend up to $500 US.
I am running Aperture 3 on a May 2011 iMac quad core i5 with 12gigs of RAM, 1TB HD, and the latest Snow Leopard OS 10.6.7 I think. Printer is a Canon Pro9000 mkII, and I only use oem consumables.
Also, if anyone can recc good color management reading that's NOT geared to PS or Elements–or “application agnostic”–that'd be great as well. Cheers! JB
Jim,
I’ve been looking at the ColorMunki Photo (its on my Amazon wishlist). I read several good reviews on it but I haven’t used it myself. It not only calibrates displays, but printers and projectors as well. Works with any application including Aperture.
They recently introduced the ColorMunki Display which only works with displays, not printers. It’s cheaper than the Photo version and may be what you need if you don’t plan to calibrate your printer. But you’ll be constrained in using different brands of paper that don’t have color profiles available.
I agree there is a dizzying array of products out there. My opinions are only based on research. I haven’t used any color calibration products yet.
Thomas
T, thanks, I guess we’re in the same boat here. Amazon ColorMunki reviews really run the “gamut” (NPI) from great to awful, so Im wary of such a wide variance.
Hopefully someone with experience can chime in here and give us some guidance. JB
There are some webinars over on the x-ritephoto site on how the ColorMunki works. It’s a bit of a marketing operation but you can see how the thing works and what it can do. Worth a look if you haven’t used a colorimeter or seen one in use.
http://xritephoto.com/ph_learning.aspx?action=webinarsarchive Look for one labeled “Beyond Monitor Calibration - Get Prints That Match Your Display!”
Thomas
Every piece of calibration hardware is ‘Aperture Friendly’. Although I haven’t used the color munki myself, I would indeed recommend it, as it is the cheapest one that will also do printer calibration. (and fits exactly in your budget)
Then about a good book, you could maybe look into ‘real world colormanagement’ by bruce fraser. But you could get any other book If you like. It doesn’t matter that they are geared towards PS or PSE. The principles and terminology are exactly the same in every software package.