The Colormunki Design: Monitor Calibration for the Ultimate Designer

Colormunki is a favorite calibration tool among many photographers I know. The very basic model from Colormunki is going to be comparable to the Spyder5 that I reviewed earlier. Rather than the basic model, I decided to test the much-more advanced Colormunki Design. The Colormunki Design is going to be overkill for most photographers out there as it is really for design professionals. This thing is absolutely loaded with features to help the user pin point exact color on anything.

With how advanced the Colormunki Design is, I struggled a bit with the set up of this calibrator. It came with a cd for installation, but the laptop I wanted to test the system on does not have a cd drive.

While this is annoying in this day and age, it was an easy problem to overcome. I used a separate computer to make a copy of the software and then tried to install it. Unfortunately, the fix that should have worked was not to be as the software installation did not work. From there, I got on the website and found what I thought was the correct software and downloaded it. Upon installation, I learned that it was outdated and I had to download and install an update. Overall, the download and installation process took quite a bit longer than I was anticipating.

I thought my problems would end there and I could get to using the calibrator. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Once I got the software installed, I went to start using the program and I could not get the activation to work. Without activating the software, I was not able to use the calibrator. At this point, I finally gave up and reached out for help by contacting Colormunki through their website. To their credit, I received a very quick response that contained an updated version of the software and a patch to install. Upon installation, the activation worked seamlessly and I was able to start testing out the Colormunki Design.

The calibration was a bit more complex with this tool, but that is to be expected given the capability of all it does beyond just monitor calibration. In addition to calibrating your monitor, the Design gives you complete control over every color you can imagine to ensure you can match every color perfectly. You can get the colors to match from many sources. You can pull colors to match from the built in library or match colors perfectly from a different image, but my favorite capability of the Colormunki Design was the ability to pull colors from any real life object sitting in front of you. Basically, you can scan any object with the calibrator and it will load that color into your database. You can then ensure the color on your computer perfectly matches the real life color of anything you photograph. Obviously, this capability is something that would be insanely valuable to any professional product photographer They would be able to quickly and easily ensure their image of any product matches exactly in color to the real life item they photographed. No more messing with gray cards and trying to eyeball it. The Colormunki Design removes any chance for error and does the work for you.

For my own, less precise work, consisting of landscape and portrait images, I was very pleased with the results I received using the Colormunki Design. The colors were very accurate and tmy prints matched my computer display very well.

As of the time of this article, the Colormunki Design was available on Amazon for around $500. Be sure to check out all our favorites at our Recommended Gear Page.

The Colormunki Design: Monitor Calibration for the Ultimate Designer

One thought on “The Colormunki Design: Monitor Calibration for the Ultimate Designer”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Recent Posts