From Certification to Canvas: A Color Management Journey

Nathaniel Morrow

When you say the time period “color management” within the printing trade, you’ll most likely get combined reactions. Most know the challenges that coloration poses to printing (and the equally difficult complications they trigger), however additionally they perceive the significance of getting it proper.

But now and again, you’ve gotten people who get actually enthusiastic about coloration administration. Nathaniel Morrow, a fine art photographer and artist based mostly in New York City, is a kind of folks. His day job is with a nonprofit, which additionally occurs to interact with the printing trade, however as a photographer specializing in summary “lensless” imagery, he loves honing his coloration administration abilities for artistic and private causes.

Nathaniel’s relentless pursuit of training has led him to all sorts of platforms, however it was attending a PRINTING United Expo a couple of years in the past that he first got here throughout the iLEARNING+ platform.

A Self-Taught Path into Printing and Color

Around six years in the past, Nathaniel was employed at a significant nonprofit, the place he will get loads of publicity to the printing trade. At the time, that they had a digital press in addition to primary reducing and binding gear. He needed to do loads of studying and analysis to find out how the whole lot labored.

Luckily, he’s all the time felt a pure draw towards all issues technical. “I really like getting into the guts of machines and figuring out how things work,” he explains.

On the nice arts facet of the equation, Nathaniel notes that he has been a photographer on and off since 2008 when he obtained what he describes as his “first real camera.” But it’s solely been up to now three years that he’s gotten severe about it. That pursuit additionally requires an intensive understanding of printing, particularly coloration administration.

“[Around] 2024, I started going out and doing street photography,” he says. “I started diving into abstract and once I started getting into [that] is when I got really serious about color and about print.”

Nathaniel Morrow loves exploring summary photogprahy, with a selected concentrate on what he calls “lensless” pictures. All photos courtesy Nathaniel Morrow

His need to be taught and push boundaries spearheaded the vigorous pursuit to realize the very best print consequence. “Once you start pushing the limits of photographic and screen technology, you start running into a lot of issues with reproducing that print, because there’s really only so far you can go before you run up against limitations,” Nathaniel explains. “I got really interested in researching the physics of that and optical design, and a lot of really niche questions about what’s possible and the most bleeding-edge technologies.”

Over the course of the previous few years, his nonprofit job and severe endeavor into pictures landed him at a PRINTING United Expo. Not solely has his nonprofit firm bought gear from present exhibitors, however there was one thing else that caught his eye.

Turning Industry Resources into Personal Creative Growth

Nathaniel has turned to a wide range of platforms, comparable to YouTube, for studying. When attending the Expo a pair years in the past, he noticed a banner for iLEARNING+. “I saw some of the advertisements for the platform at the conference, and I thought, I bet there’s stuff that we can use there,” he says. When he began exploring it, he landed on the Color Management Professional certifications. So, he took benefit of the chance and now has the Color Management Professional: Master Print certification.

“It’s a really useful primer on all the technologies out there and all of the things you have to consider, because you don’t realize what you don’t know,” he notes.

And now that Nathaniel has his very personal Canon Pro 1100 for his pictures, he can apply the data throughout a number of channels. “I’ve been interested in color management for a while,” he says. “I find it really fascinating. I love seeing the results. And I figured, if I am going to really master this, if I am going to really try to find the limits, then I need the next level of knowledge, and this [certification] seemed like a good fit for that.”

This is very true for the kind of pictures Nathaniel does, which he describes as “lensless.”

“I literally take the lens off the camera,” he explains. “I use a bare sensor and shape the light that hits that so it can produce these incredibly vivid and saturated colors that even screens have difficulty reproducing because they are so bright and unsaturated.”

This strategy will get him excited, however it additionally helps him push the boundaries, which can also be the place the iLEARNING+ data is available in. “I’m really interested in the absolute limits of technology, like when you do stuff it’s not designed to do, and then you just see what happens,” he says. “The course was really useful in understanding what the standards are.”

Pushing the Boundaries of Color

While Nathaniel pulled loads of use from the Master Print certification in terms of understating coloration administration, he additionally discovered a couple of different advantages. First up, he gained publicity to loads of printing terminology he didn’t essentially know beforehand.

“There [are] a lot of things where it’s like, I know this concept, but I don’t know what it is formally called,” he says. “Now, I have a vocabulary.”

But he additionally got here away with the flexibility to realize constant outcomes, which is all the time an enormous problem in terms of coloration administration. “As far as practical end result terms, I can just print things that are a lot closer to what I have on the screen,” he explains. “The moment I realized that I really achieved something is when I had an image on my screen, and I printed a proof, held them up next to each other, just at the light temperature, and they were identical. And that felt like a real achievement.”

Looking forward to the longer term, not solely does Nathaniel plan to take extra programs, he additionally hopes to share his data with others. “It’s just a great way to advance work, and personally, in other consulting environments, it’s something that I can offer to people,” he says. “I’ve grown gradually into this world — I pick up a little bit of knowledge here and there, and then suddenly, someone asks me a question. I respond instinctively. I’m like, how can I have the answer to that? And it’s just fun to be in that position … to be able to tell them, here’s how you do this, here’s why you do this, and here’s what the results look like.”