Monaco EZ Color

If your'e into colour management then this application may be of interest. Monaco EZ Color is a one stop colour management application, from here you can create a monitor profile, printer profile, scanner profile and edit the profiles to taste. I have used and reviewed Monaco EZ Color over the years, it's a very simple application to use and achieves some very good results. However, this software is not a replacement for other high end software from X-Rite or ColorVision, but will serve as a good starting point for those who want to explore colour management.

EZ Color will run on both Macintosh and Windows, two IT8 targets are supplied - 5x7 inch print and 5x4 transparency together with documentation in PDF format.

I am not going to do a full review on this software, but here is a quick workflow to show you how to use the application.

Select Create Input profile

Select No Colour Corrections in EpsonScan

Scan your IT8 target with all the colour and verify that the scan is OK - 300dpi for 5x4 film

Select the correct reference file for your target and the software does the rest

Give your profile a unique name and save

Creating a custom profile took less than three minutes from launch of application to finish, below is the result of my custom profile.

Straight scan with no colour correction - see second screen shot

EPSON Perfection - V700/V750 - Film profile applied (canned profile)

Custom Monaco profile - this can be edited with EZ Color

To apply a profile to an image in Photoshop CS2 you have to select Edit > Assign profile and then select the profile from the drop down list. Next convert your scan into your working colour space, I have used sRGB for my sample as I intend to display this on a web page, but you may want to use the Adobe 1998 space.

Select a profile from the profile drop down list

Convert the profile to your destination or working colour space.

Given that the software created this profile so quickly I was surprised at how good the results were. This software may be the only colour management application that most users will require - unless you want to dive into the depths of custom profiles.

A useful application to have, Monaco EZ Color together with the full version of SilverFast are both justification for spending the extra on the V750.