PMA this year played host once again to the Color Munki, hopping around the show floor as a potentially interesting accessory item for imaging dealers. While twist-lock monopods are hot, high-end lenses are as desired as diamonds, and Fong diffusers have an ardent fanbase, the majority of photo enthusiasts have yet to bang on camera counters demanding to see the latest USB spectrophotometer.
We’d be hard pressed to find average D-SLR owners who even know what the phrase "color management system" means. Didn’t they already shell out a grand for a camera, a grand or more for a laptop and CS3, and $500 for a state-of-the-art printer offering vibrant color reproduction? Are you telling them they need to invest hundreds more to get a truly accurate representation of a bleedin’ daffodil?
Such is the marketing challenge for makers of calibration and profiling devices. While portrait studios and design professionals value the importance of matching their painstakingly edited images to the final output, prosumers are still new to this high-tech step in the workflow. And understandably, the typical $1500-and-up pricetag for the hardware/software combo of a good color management system has seemed unaffordable, not to mention overachieving, to home-based photographers. But a new product by X-Rite may change their minds and, in the process, allow America’s fast-growing population of photo-pros the affordable ability to produce spot-on prints they can sell or exhibit. The $499 ColorMunki Photo is a small, solid-performing profiler & calibrator that’s arrived with an intuitive interface and even its own short tutorial video on YouTube.
Small, black and highly-portable, looking rather like a carpenter’s retractable tape measure or a child’s snail pull-toy, the ColorMunki Photo is designed for convenience. The spectrometer device itself has a plastic casing and generous strap which is subtly weighted with sand to anchor the device as it lies over the top of a monitor or laptop. Packaged with an instructional manual (short, to X-Rite’s credit, and barely-needed, even better) and installation software, the ColorMunki Photo can be loaded and operational in under an hour, rendering the colors in final photo prints or on the wall/screen output of video projector extremely close to the colors you see on your computer screen.
The process, though still mighty techy, is actually fun. Once the software is loaded, you rest the device right on your display and watch as it runs a little show of test colors. Zap, your screen is calibrated. Matching those colors to the printer you’re using requires another bunch of tests. This time, you tell the software which printer, paper and ink you’ll be using, then print out a page of brightly-toned swatches. You move the ColorMunki device over each of these swatches in a steady, forward motion (it reminded me of how you’d divvy up dough with a pizza cutter for breadsticks). Your computer takes in this information and then guides you to print out a second batch of swatches, these a little quieter (nature/skin tones), and repeat the motion with ColorMunki. To get even more precise color input, you can also scan an actual representational photo of your work, perhaps a bride’s portrait, and let the computer maximize the matching potential to those particular shades.
It’s all a lot easier than it sounds, actually, and will likely sell best if you can demonstrate the ease of the device, making sure you show customers the difference between prints that were done before and after a color management system was on the job. Those prosumers who’ve already felt the frustration of the disconnect between that gorgeous bride they saw in their viewfinder and the strangely-orange-skinned lady in their first trash prints will be fascinated. And pitching the ColorMunki Photo as "at last, the finishing touch" to a consummate pro’s workflow may just seal the deal.
