X-Rite’s ColorMunki

User review by Edward Crim

Rating – 2 stars out of 5

List Price - $495

Street Price - $450

Color management seems to me to be a lot like voodoo; you pay your money, do the long and complicated ritual, and maybe your enemies (bad colors, in this case) roll over and die. My first venture into profile making was some years ago with software purchased by an employee who should have known better (it’s a long story). It was a complicated process involving lots of strips of different colors that had to be cut apart and fed through our spectrophotometer one by one. The instructions were not easy to follow and it took a long time. It also turned out profiles that didn’t work very well! Fortunately for all concerned, that company went the way of the Dodo (though I was kinda sorry to see my money disappear with them).

Since that time I have been using a variety of profiles provided by the manufacturers of whatever devices I was using, with various results. I did purchase the Monaco EZ Color  software and Monaco Optix colorimeter for calibrating my printers and monitors, but the results were mixed. EZ color did not do a very good job of calibrating my printers (it relied on a flatbed scanner to read the test prints), but it did a fantastic job calibrating my monitors. I run my Macintosh G5 with dual monitors; a 20 inch Apple Cinema Display (which is an LCD monitor) and a 12 year old 17 inch Viewsonic (CRT) monitor, but the Monaco software and hardware combination manages to give me an almost perfect match between the two! Not only that, but the photographic prints I get from my custom lab look like what I see on my monitors.

Still, I have not been happy with what I’ve been getting from my large format inkjet printers. I have two HP 3500 CP Designjet printers which I power with Onyx Poster Shop, and while this powerful software prints a wide variety of file types quickly, and gives complete control over the printing process, it not only offers no way to generate custom profiles (without spending an additional $3500) but the quality of the profiles that are available for free from Onyx Graphics leave a lot to be desired.

Into my life swung the ColorMunki, from X-Rite, a spectrophotometer and supporting software that advertised it could do what I wanted: calibrate my monitors and create icc profiles  for both RGB and CMYK printers. Cool! I could hardly wait to get my hands on  one! I ordered my unit as soon as I received notification they were available, and after looking at the box sitting on my desk for a week, set out to calibrate my monitors.

The monitor calibration process is easy to follow and quick to use, but I have a few issues with the way the ColorMunki works: one is the case the ColorMunki spectrophotometer sits in when you hang it over your monitor. It’s OK, but doesn’t stay in place very well. A strap weighted with sand is attached to the case, and the idea is to put the strap over the back of your monitor to counter-balance the device, but it just doesn’t stay put. I wound up putting a piece of Velcro on the top of my Apple Cinema Display and its mate on the strap, just to keep my ColorMunki from climbing down the screen.

The second issue is a bit more serious. The ColorMunki has no settings for profiling a CRT monitor. Now there are many of us who are still using CRTs either because we have good units and will use them until they die or because CRTs tend to have a wider color gamut than LCD displays.

The third issue with using the ColorMunki for monitor profiling is that it produced profiles markedly inferior to what my old system (Monaco Optix & EZ Color) generates. It made my ViewSonic CRT look yellow and it made my Apple Cinema Display look dark. This was a major shock. I expected the newer technology of the ColorMunki (with all of the technical expertise of X-Rite Corporation behind it) to be an improvement, not a step backwards. I tried using the ColorMunki to profile the monitor on my MacBook Pro as well, and the results can only be described as ugly (though extremely ugly would also work). Why such bad results? I really have no idea, but I worked through the process twice (with the same results) before I got out my MonacoOptix and redid the profiles.

My next project was to see if I could generate good profiles for my older HP large format printers. Since I use a Raster Image Processor (RIP) and not the system driver, I had to have a way to get the color chart generated by the ColorMunki software to my RIP. On the Macintosh, this is pretty easy as PDF file generation is built into the operating system. Using the OS X HP system driver for the HP 3500CP I set the color management option to “No Color Adjustment – Expert users only” (I guess that makes me an expert user) and the rendering intent to “Perceptual” before selecting “Save as PDF”.

I then transported the resulting PDF file to my PC and printed it with the Onyx RIP, using the “All ICC Profiles Off” setting under the Color Management pull down menu. (being able to turn off color management is vital to the process of profiling – otherwise the profiles are contaminated by the settings and accuracy is impossible).

After I printed the color chart file with the paper and ink set I wanted to profile (I have one of my printers set up with HP dye inks and the other with HP pigmented inks), I scanned the print with the ColorMunki and waited while it generated a second color chart. I repeated the process of creating a PDF that I had used with the first chart and printed it via the Onyx Poster Shop RIP, again being careful to set the color management to “All ICC Profiles Off”. After this second print had time to dry, I scanned it with the ColorMunki, let it do its cogitating, and lo and behold, I had me a genuine ICC profile! I hurried over to my PC, installed the profile into the proper folder and picked a photo to print. It looked good, Pretty Darn Good (PDG), in my own humble estimation. Not only did it look good, but it matched what I saw on my displays! Woo hoo!

I repeated this entire procedure (each profile took 30-40 minutes to make, depending on how many games of Spider Solitaire I played during the process) for several paper and ink sets. I profiled some 8 year old Mitsubishi photo glossy paper (that I got on sale) with the dye ink set, and some current HP Photo Glossy, HP Heavy Matt, Kodak Photo Luster, and HP Opaque Vinyl with the UV (pigmented) ink set. The results were uniform and excellent, with extremely accurate color matching across paper types and ink sets. I am quite impressed with the ColorMunki’s ability to create ICC profiles!

The ColorMunki also has the ability to sample colors from printed materials (and other things such as your arm, your car, your cat, etc) allowing you to build a library of colors you can use as swatches in Photoshop and other programs. I played with that part of the software a bit, but it wasn’t my primary focus.

So, here’s the scoop. If you want to profile your monitors (particularly if you have CRT monitors), forget the ColorMunki and get something else (Try DataColor’s Spyder http://spyder.datacolor.com/index_us.php  or X-Rite’s i1 Display 2 http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=788  ). In my book (my MacBook in particular) the ColorMunki gets an “F” for monitor profiling. If, however, you want to make ICC profiles for your printers, I’d give it an “A”.

Be sure to check out my blog on life, the universe and everything (thinking inside the camera’s box). http://www.edwardcrim.com/blog .

Notes on color management:

1.It’s expensive. I create camera profiles for my in-studio photos of paintings (to reproduce as Giclée prints) by photographing a GretagMacbeth Digital Color Checker SG (color target - http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=938) and analyzing it in PictoColor’s InCamera (a photoshop plug-in   http://www.pictocolor.com/incamera.htm ). The former costs $300 and the latter, $200. I think I paid $500 for the EZ Color 2 & MonacoOptix combination (it was a few years ago). The ColorMunki lists for $500. The DTP 41 spectrophotometer that I started with cost $2400 new, and the software that didn’t work cost $795.

2.It’s easy. Compared to the way we used to make color prints, in the bad old days of film, enlargers, and smelly chemical processors, a color-managed digital workflow seems almost no effort. The set-up involves a bit of time (and requires good components), but little thought. Your computer, a machine 1000 times more powerful than those that ran the Apollo program, does all the work!

3.It’s worth it. The quality of the camera profiles I get using the Color Checker SG and InCamera is phenomenal! I am able to make Giclée prints on my HP Z3100 that match the colors, tones and contrast of the original artwork (The HP Z3100 has a built in spectrophotometer). I can send files off to my professional photo lab knowing that the prints I get will match what I see on my monitors.

Edward Crim is a photographer and print maker in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a member of the Professional Photographers of America and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He has been sitting on the bleeding edge of digital imaging technology since 1992.