Digital Home Thoughts: Ken Rockwell: Color Management is for Wimps

"Too many marketers of color management tools have done too good a job. Sadly, many impressionable photographers believe the ads and seminars and waste too much time and money getting crummier results than if they left everything alone. I shoot and print, never waste any time with profiles or spaces, and everything looks great. Color profiles and color spaces are for dweebs. You don't need them. I'm a dweeb, I invented the world's first dedicated digital color-space conversion chip back in 1990 with TRW, and even I don't bother color managing anything except my monitor. No photographer needs to do color management manually any more. Color management is already built into everything by designers who know what they're doing. Any attempts to outsmart them usually delivers crummier results than leaving everything alone."



On the one hand I completely agree with Ken in that color management is a complete waste of time. After all, most devices are pretty well configured these days. It just doesn't seem worth our time to callibrate things. We have talked about hardware that will callibrate monitors etc. here on DMT a lot. But then, on the other hand, I wonder if Ken includes callibrating the colors within photos taken with digital cameras in his umbrella of things that don't need callibration. I have taken a lot of digital pictures now and I will often open up pictures in Photoshop (or now Photo .NET) and adjust colors or levels in order to "fix" some problems with picture, make certain parts of images pop, or just to play around. Either way, I wonder what Ken's take on this is.