ColorMunki Photo Monitor Printer and Projector Profiler

ColorMunki Photo Monitor Printer and Projector Profiler

ColorMunki Photo is the innovative way to bring your photos from screen to print with color perfection. Designed for wedding, social, or portrait photographers, this color control solution delivers technological features for display, projector, and RGB/CMYK printer profiling. You’ll now be able to send your images to your clients, confident that they will be viewed in a calibrated environment, using the DigitalPouch communication tool. All this delivered in an all-in-one integrated solution with a streamlined interface, making the most of your digital workflow. All-in-One spectrophotometer means no separate devices needed to profile your displays and printers. ColorMunki lets you swing perfectly from screen to print with quick, easy, and accurate display-to-print match. Software guides you through whichever profiling function you desire. Select ‘Match My Printer To My Display’ and you’ll be completely guided through the profiling process for both your display and your printer. ColorMunki can calibrate multiple displays with ease and provides before and after visualization, as well as calibration reminder prompts. ColorMunki’s superfast scanning can rapidly measure test charts in less than one minute. With AppSet, ColorMunki talks with your photo and design applications to automate printer profile settings. ColorMunki automatically extracts the top colors, or you can go directly into your image and add any color to your palette. With ColorMunki’s PrintSafe checking capabilities, you’ll be able to preview your color palettes under different lighting sources or printing processes before you go to production.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Color Munki Works Great!
Using the Color Munki has saved me so much time and money that it paid for itself in the first month. It’s easy to use and creates great profiles. Two things are important to know however, 1. – if you have a cheap monitor, it’s going to be harder to match your prints and 2. – I found that certain fine art papers really need some extra time to dry before the color sets – on the information sheet for Epson’s Somerset Velvet, it says that can take 24 hours! If you do your test prints and wait a bit before reading them in, the profiles in the soft-proof in Photoshop look really close to the print. No more hit or miss printing – I Love It!

5 Stars Profiling is PC (pretty cool)
With 28 years as a professional photographer, I feel a mixture of delight and relief when I find a product that works so well and makes my job better and easier. Engineered for accuracy and ease of use…I love my Munki. I never had the time, but especially the patience, to profile papers the now old-fashioned way. And the Digital Pouch is quite a bonus when trying to help clients see the images correctly on their own monitors. Thank you X-Rite.

1 Star Worked poorly for me- ineffectual technical support
First off, I’m no novice to color management, monitor profiling and ICC profile creation. Previously I had been using Monaco EZColor which was a great product with fantastic personalized tech support until X-Rite bought them and gutted both the product and support.

Anyway, I was really looking forward to ColorMunki so that I could get away from EZ Color’s need for ITT target scanning and the laborious process required to create a monitor-paper profile. While the software installed easily and the proces of creating a monitor-paper profile went smoothly, the results were horrible on my new Canon Pixma Pro9000. Greenish casts to every profile, and worse, the default profile created for my monitor distorted all the colors. Unlike EZ Color, when you create a monitor profile with Munki, it does not use the RGB sliders found on most higher-end monitors, so there is no way to compensate for under or over bias on one color.

Calling X-Rite, while easy enough to get through, was a joke. The only positive I can say about the experience is that the call seemingly stayed in the US, but the tech support guy was essentially useless. When asked about how to correct my profile when using Photoshop CS3 he replied with the scripted answer that X-Rite does not support the use of their product with third party applications! Well, what good is making a profile if you can’t utilize it in your post-processing software? He did take my e-mail and promise to send me some urls that might be pertainent to PS CS3 but as expected, the e-mail never arrived.

All in all, I was tremendously disappointed with ColorMunki. I had high expectataions that were dashed, surprsing for a $500 not-necessarily entry-level product.

ADDENDUM: In all fairness, I have to report that X-Rite read the above and contacted me by e-mail with an offer to assist me with the installation and usage of ColorMunki. And, interestingly, the next day I did receive a response from the original T.S. person (who I may have unfairly maligned in the above review) with a link to some assistance for CS3. I am away on a photo shoot at the time these e-mails arrived, so I will have to wait until I return to try out their assistance.

5 Stars ColorMunki Photo
An excellent device. Does excellent calibration in “Easy” mode. For a little more precision and options use “Advanced” mode. It is especially easy to match monitor to printer.

5 Stars Great device, but beware: color calibration is not for the meek
I’ve used a number of color calibration tools, and find the munki to be about the best for the money. (I use it on a Mac Pro with a 30″ monitor and an HP B9180 printer.)

Color profiles are very tricky to use on the Mac, and even trickier on Windows. Basically, you need to make very, very sure that you’re not correcting the image twice. In Lightroom, for example, there’s a pulldown for whether LR or the printer manages its colors. Make sure your setting matches the printer driver’s setup! (This is somewhat done for you on the Mac, but not on Windows.)

Lightroom is the easiest tool to use for printing, at least in my experience. Doing it from Photoshop is harder, and you often have to wrestle with the various settings to get it right.

Anyway, I believe this double-correction issue has more to do with the negative reviews than any problems with the device itself. The munki is very, very easy to use. A lot of stuff that would be a lot of work in other tools (e.g. color calibration targets) is all integral to the device, and well managed by the munki software. The profiles themselves are absolutely great — at least for my setup.

Finally, if you care about getting photographs right — both on screen and on paper — a tool like the munki is essential. Editing photos on a well calibrated monitor will help ensure your photos will have a life beyond your current computer or screen. Imagine the trouble if you notice all your old pictures look a little greenish on your next computer. Which was right, your new machine or your old? And will you enjoy editing 5,000 pictures to fix the problem?

Bottom line: great tool for the dedicated amateur photographer. Everyone should at least calibrate their monitors. If a munki seems a little rich for your blood, then consider a Pantone Huey instead: Pantone huey MEU101

Buy/More Info