( 5 reviews )
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( 3 of 5 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 14 2006
Rather than present genuinely useful information on the various theories behind color management which can be applied to a wide variety of situations, the author of this book instead chooses to pad page after page with promotional fluff advertising a select handful of software products the reader is encouraged to purchase in order to follow along. Granted, you can't build a printer profile without a spectrophotometer of some kind, but the tone of the book is generally "go buy this and you're done" rather than "this is what needs to happen and here are a variety of ways you can choose to accomplish these goals". Apple might have invented color management, but they've let their ColorSync CMM grow horribly stagnant (and buggy) over the years, and this officially endorsed training manual reflects the company's priorities unfortunately well. Hopefully Aperture's belly flop will convince someone at Apple that people really do care about this stuff and spur someone into action, but until then, buy Bruce Fraser or Abhay Sharma's book instead.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 25 2005
This book has a serious flaw. It includes a demo version of ProfileMaker, which you need to use to create profiles in Lesson 4. Unfortunately, the demo version doesn't actually allow you to create profiles, so you can't complete the lesson! In other words, you really can't use this book unless you spends hundreds more on various software and hardware to actually do the color management.
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( 6 of 6 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jun 9 2005
This book should be titled Color Management in Adobe Applications on MacOS X. I picked up this book with the expectation of finding tips on how to print using Apple's Colorsync color management facility but most of the book simply covers printing using Adobe's color management system, which has totally different controls to Colorsync. While coverage of printing color-managed prints from the Adobe applications such as Photoshop are quite comprehensive, there is hardly any discussion of how to print from a non-Adobe application that uses Apple's Colorsync. From that perspective, this is a book that is comparable to Real World Color Management but from a less technical, more hands-on viewpoint since RWCM covers Adobe's color management system pretty comprehensively. It would behoove the author to plug this gap in a future edition because there is a dearth of documentation on Colorsync. Each iteration of Colorsyn brings in new features but leaves it up to users to basically poking around a black box which has a multititude of buttons, levers, and switches but no manual.
