Being able to edit and print your own pictures is one of the advantages of digital photography, but it can also be one of the biggest headaches.

If you've ever shot a brightly coloured scene that comes out mysteriously flat and lifeless, or taken a picture of a beautiful blue flower only to see it come out an unnatural shade of purple, you'll appreciate the effectiveness of Profile Prism.

With a conventional film camera, you simply shoot the image and send it off for processing, secure in the knowledge that your prints will be returned looking exactly the way that you intended. Or, if you're a professional, you process and print them yourself to produce the desired effect.

The problem with digital photography is that you don't know the original characteristics of your 'film'. Your camera will produce an RGB image, but the RGB colour space is device-dependent, which means that the RGB colour values your camera uses to describe, for example, purple, might not be the same as those used by your imaging software or printer.

There have been attempts to standardise RGB colour - the sRGB colour space is the default used on the web and is also available on most modern monitors and printers. Unfortunately, sRGB limits the range of colours available, bringing them down to a lowest common denominator level. Unfortunately, not all digital cameras support sRGB.

Profile Prism helps by enabling you to create an industry standard colour profile that details exactly what colours your camera is describing in its RGB file. This profile can then be used by any imaging program that supports ICC profiles, such as Adobe's Photoshop, to reproduce the precise colours, automatically restoring your purple flower to blue and bringing back your vivid colours. This will save you hours of tricky image manipulation.

To create your profile, you must first photograph the supplied colour target. This is a card printed with a pattern of accurately coloured squares on a grey grid. Once you've loaded this image into Profile Prism, it will automatically locate each of the coloured squares and, by comparing your image data to known values, calculate an ICC profile for your camera.

The software itself is very simple to use, but the hardest part of the procedure is taking the initial photograph of the colour target, because it's important to get the exposure exactly right and to set up your camera correctly.

Once you've created your profile, you can apply it to any images that you take with your camera. You can also use the profile retrospectively to 'breathe new life' into your existing library of pictures once you've profiled the camera that took them.

Profile Prism 1.6 lets you create a colour profile that can make a huge difference to your digital images for a relatively low cost.

Price

$69

Contact

Digital Domain: PO Box 595, Finksburg, Maryland 21048
www.ddisoftware.com/prism/