Color management is a topic that every serious photographer has to tackle at some point. I've been using and teaching it for eight years now, and just had one of my best experiences yet with the printing side.

I tend to print in batches. Every month or two I'll fire up the inkjets and print everything that I've set aside up to that point. This week was one of those times, and I needed to print both 8X10s and a few larger prints. I also remembered that X-Rite had recently sent out a note that there was updated software for their ColorMunki Photo, so I wanted to give that a try.

As with most color management packages, the ColorMunki Photo is a combination of a hardware device and software. The hardware portion is a spectrophotometer, which is what you need if you want to create custom printer profiles. This package costs about $500. Less that that and you're working with a colorimeter, which is fine for monitor profiling, but can't do prints.

Monitor profiling is all that most people need, unless you do a lot of printing yourself, and are fairly critical of the results. Moving from CRT displays to LCDs brought many benefits, but one downside was the brightness of those LCD displays. It could be difficult to dim them enough for good monitor to print matching, and in the past we've often had to adjust the RGB controls (if the monitor even had them) to achieve that. I was hoping that someone like X-Rite would address that, and now they have.

There are a number of changes to this new ColorMunki software, but the biggest for me is its ability to better control that luminance. When running the software I chose the "Match my Printer to my Display" option, and then followed the instructions. After profiling the monitor, I continued and made a custom profile for the papers I was using: Epson glossy for the Epson R1800, Epson matte for the Epson R2400, Hahnemuhle smooth fine art and HP Satin for the HP 130NR. In every case I had some of the best monitor-to-print matching I've seen so far. In making about thirty prints, I only had two that I needed to make a second print of. Wow!

It also gives me the ability to further customize the profile based on the types of photos I print, and I'll work on that soon. The improvements in color management over the years haven't been fast, but they've been good. And this latest one is my favorite yet.