Customer Reviews

Apple Pro Training Series: Color Management in Mac OS X

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

At first when I started reading this book, I was amazed at how fast I was flipping through the pages! I loved it and kepts going. The first part of the book explains color and its management within Mac OS X pretty well, I was impressed when I learnt so much about the color sync. untility and other stuff like that. However, the more I read the more I felt like I was going through the chapters a little too fast for my liking. Why? Because I found that a lot of the times the author would repeat what he said before, making it a bit repetitive....

As much as I do not own a Gretag Macbeth Eye-One or any of those devices that calibrate monitors and other things, I learnt about them in the book. One thing I found odd was that I got pretty much the same information from apple.com's PRO section's online seminars..which was a bummer when I found out.

Anyways, I'm still a bit confused about color management and might have to indulge in another book for a clearer understanding of it. This book just seemed like it didnt explain everything enough for me to really understand. It's easy to follow and click step by step, its hard to understand what you're really doing so u dont need to refer to a book everytime...

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.

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.

A fast book you can read in one day, full of large screenshot all in color.

A step by step book to configure your color workflow in Mac OS X for home or professional, in a only-Mac or Mac-PC office.

A chapter is for Adobe Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design.

There is also a chapter for a web-based color management.

Great Book.

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.