Digital Photography Editing Tips

This is a collection of things that are important to know if you spend a lot of time editing your pictures. It is not a complete list, just some things that I've figured out and find useful for sharing (and documenting so I don't forget...)

Color Correction

Go out and buy one of those colorimeters - it's completely worth it, trust me.

Color Correcting Multiple Monitors in WinXP

Windows XP has some color management features built in out of the box, but they're all pretty much useless. One of the useless features is the ability to load color profiles for displays automatically. "Great," you say, "I'll be up and running with pretty colors on my super sexy multi-monitor work system in no time!". Then you realize that Windows XP only allows one color profile to be loaded for each physical video controller - so if both your monitors are on one card and you're too cheap to go buy more cards (like me) you're out of luck. "Bah, silly Microsoft," you say, but wait! Microsoft has redeemed themselves with Windows Vista, which allows you to load profiles for each monitor! What's that? Don't want to "upgrade" to the most power hungry OS ever? Me either.

Luckily for us, Microsoft back ported the new Color control panel to XP - probably in an effort to attract more design people away from Mac, but that's a good enough reason for me. You can get it here (If that doesn't work, I'm very sorry, Microsoft.com doesn't do permalinks. Try Google-ing it.) After installing that package, you'll have a new control panel applet called "Color" which can manage profiles for multiple monitors, printers, and scanners connected to your system simultaneously. You'll still have to profile each device then associate it with the proper device in the Color control panel. For monitors, don't forget to set the primary display to the display you're trying to meter from or your colorimeter might not work. Happy color correcting!