IDEA: Colour matching wizard

[cranioscopical]

Setting up effective colour matching between monitor screen(s) and input/output devices seems to be a hit-and-miss, not to mention tedious business.

Microsoft's 'Color' control-panel applet doesn't seem too useful.

Current software approaches don't appear to offer a good link between screen calibration and, say, printer output... or between camera input, monitor, and printer.

Computers are meant to resolve tedious issues for us.

How about some kind of wizard-based approach to getting the best match between devices -- from start to finish -- without using hardware tools such as a colorimeter or densitometer? Can this be done, given that so many different input/output devices exist?

[Renegade]

This would seem to be the job of the monitor company to include some swatches with the monitor so that you can actually get the proper colors.

However, that's just a bit too intelligent. Why would you ever make things easy for a user? Pure insanity!

[cranioscopical]

This would seem to be the job of the monitor company to include some swatches...

As far as I can see, various players provide various pieces of the puzzle (Adobe offers a monitor calibration tool, Corel provided a colour card with which to calibrate scanners, etc.) but I've not seen a useful and comprehensible approach that tackles the whole issue. While this may be due to my own powers of comprehension being below norm, it's for just such an eventuality that I'd like a computer-based solution to take up the slack.

[nudone]

i'd like to see this done BUT i don't think it's likely.

i've had similar monitors side by side that i tried to colour match and it just wasn't going to happen - well maybe it would if i had about 5 months to try and figure out exactly what needed tweaking. matching almost every shade would always throw out a couple of others - perhaps that is all i could hope for.

as for matching with the printer - i gave up. if you've got the perfect 'closed' system then i assume you'll nearly get there, i.e. use the exact same paper, exact same ink, exact same lighting conditions.

okay, i admit that is what i should be doing anyway - i'll consider it.

cranioscopical, if you could suggest a way of how the colour matching would be done it might prompt someone to have a go at coding a little wizard thing.