X-Rite announces new i1Studio end-to-end colour correction system for photographers
Oct 26, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Colour management can be such a pain. You’ve got cameras and printers to profile, monitors to calibrate, all in an effort to reproduce accurate colour. To make sure that your camera sees colour the same way you do. And ensure that what ends up on paper is exactly what you see on your monitor.
X-Rite are making that a little easier today, though, announcing the new X-Rite i1Studio. It’s essentially two products. The first is a standard 24 patch colour reference target, used to create DNG camera profiles. Basically, half of the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. The other is the new calibration & profiling device for monitors and printers (amongst others).
The i1Studio looks very much based on the X-Rite ColorMunki. In fact, existing ColorMunki owners even receive a free update for the new i1Studio calibration & profiling software. So, if you’ve already got a ColorMunki, head on over and download it.
Like the ColorMunki, the X-Rite i1Studio allows you to profile monitors and projectors. It also lets you create both RGB and CMYK printer profiles, as well as scanners. The i1Studio also works with Apple mobile devices, using ColorTRUE for iOS. Although the requirements seem a bit at odds. The X-Rite website says iOS7+ but the app download says iOS10+
With the inclusion of the 24 patch colour reference target, you can now quickly and easily profile cameras. too. The ColorChecker Passport has been absolutely invaluable to me. I shoot with 4 different Nikon bodies and occasionally a Canon or Sony. These 24 little swatches let me get all of those cameras to a consistent starting point so I can use the same post workflow on them all.
X-Rite are offering a trade in programme for the X-Rite i1Studio. If you have old monitor calibration device, even if it’s not made by X-Rite, you can save up to $50 on the purchase of an i1Studio. Perhaps it might finally be time for me to retire my i1 Display 2.
The i1Studio, before any trade-in or other discounts, is $489 and is available to pre-order now. Shipping dates have not yet been announced. Find out more on the X-Rite website.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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5 responses to “X-Rite announces new i1Studio end-to-end colour correction system for photographers”
I wish if X-Rite would come up with something like remote printer calibration. For me, and probably most people out there, we do depend on services of a third party for printing and most often they do not have any calibration profiles for their stuff. It would be nice if we can print the patches with those shops and come back home and try to make a profile out of them for own workflow.
You could send the tif file with the color patches to your print service and then generate a profile out of that print.
I would not recommend that because you can’t be sure that your print service uses the same roll of paper or the same printer for your ‘profiled’ order (eg for the first it’s an older canon, for the next it’s a brand new epson printer).
I create a profile for every single roll because manufacturers could change a bit in the process, coatings can be a bit different and so on….
Maybe there is a small printshop in your area where you can talk with them about profiling?
This is indeed what I was thinking, but after some emails to X-Rite, they told me that remote profiling is not possible and the target printer must be connected to the workstation where ColorMunki is installed (that way the software would control various aspects).
Unfortunately, for us here in Kuwait, the term “profiling” and “soft-proofing” or even “color management” is a weird concept for all (I mean it, for all). Every printing shop that I’ve visited even those considered the “best” by photographers here do not know what I was talking about, some of them even got shocked when they saw me holding my calibration device to calibrate my laptop monitor. They all work by intuition and trial and error methods. Even so-called professional photographers here (some of them won international awards even) do not know what is color management and color spaces… etc. Some of them (just some) do know about calibrating their monitors for their processing at least – and for me this is the best I can do for now. At least, something is correct at the beginning better than nothing at all!
Just thinking how those profiling services work where you send them a print of a specific color set. Maybe that’s a restriction with the colormunki to have those who need that ‘advanced’ functions buy the more expensive products.
I’d like to have icc profiles, dng-profiles are pretty useless in a dng-less workflow… (seems I have to get into basICColor…)