Color calibration and software compatibility?

I've never had a big need to highly accurate with color, and just did some course white balancing. However, I'd like to kick it up and do proper color correction.

Camera --> color card (?) + software (?)-->GIMP (which will be 16 bit soon)+ monitor with CC.

I was looking into something like either
X-Rite i1 Display Pro / ColorChecker Passport Bundle
or
Datacolor Spyder 4 Capture Pro

both of these have monitor calibration, color cards, and other goodies for proper color/light balance, but they both seem to require either lightroom or photoshop explicitly. I own neither of these and have been using opensource UFRAW and GIMP and would like it if I didn't have to spend a ton on software just to be able to properly calibrate color. Is there a way around buying more software, or do I need to suck it up and get at minimum, Lightroom to generate color calibrated images to then export to GIMP?

Thanks!

You don't "have to have" Lightroom, Photoshop, or in fact any software to calibrate your monitor. When you calibrate your monitor, the calibration software creates a "Profile" that gets loaded into your graphics card when you log into your system.

The advantage of having "color-smart" software is that the apps "understand" the complexities of your system display and can handle complex jobs accordingly.

Not just Photoshop and Lightroom, though. If you have a Canon body then the Canon Raw processing software Digital Photo Professional (DPP) can use the monitor profile created from calibrating in its "rendering" operations.

Another variable/factor is the quality of your monitor. Some monitors don't "play nice" with calibration...

In a nutshell, if you are "serious" about "color management", as in colors that are very accurate in your monitor as well as printing, well, it's a "long road", involving good harware and good software, and some thoughtful attentive work!

Thanks for your reply Tony. I understand what you are saying about monitor color management. There is still the unknown (for me) remaining about using color cards to color adjust the raw images without photoshop or lightroom.

If you haven't been that picky up to now I'd go with the XRite i1 Display Pro without the Colorchecker card/software. I have a Colorchecker and don't get as much use from it as I had hoped. I also found the ACR/Lightroom Adobe Standard profile to be better than any custom profile I could produce from the Colorchecker anyway (at least that's the case for my Nikon D700). For studio work/consistent lighting I'm convinced the Colorchecker is a good tool, for everything else not so much.

Bob_A wrote in post #15663387
If you haven't been that picky up to now I'd go with the XRite i1 Display Pro without the Colorchecker card/software. I have a Colorchecker and don't get as much use from it as I had hoped. I also found the ACR/Lightroom Adobe Standard profile to be better than any custom profile I could produce from the Colorchecker anyway (at least that's the case for my Nikon D700). For studio work/consistent lighting I'm convinced the Colorchecker is a good tool, for everything else not so much.

Bob, bear in mind that the OP is using Gimp, and does not want to invest in Photoshop or Lightroom. So, I may be wrong, but having the color card may do him no good...? But, any Gimp users who work with Color Management, feel free to chime in!!

tonylong wrote in post #15663513
Bob, bear in mind that the OP is using Gimp, and does not want to invest in Photoshop or Lightroom. So, I may be wrong, but having the color card may do him no good...? But, any Gimp users who work with Color Management, feel free to chime in!!

Maybe Tony. It's just my feeling that trying to create general purpose profiles that compete with ones created under ISO standard lighting will just lead you to wonder which one is correct. No doubt there is variation between cameras, but that inaccuracy might be small compared to errors in a profile caused by using an inaccurate light source for creating the profile.

OTOH I also don't know Gimp ... so maybe the program doesn't even allow for any kind of custom made profile. If that's the case, and if the OP just wants a good neutral target an X-rite custom white balance card (or one of the cheaper alternatives) might be a better choice.

It is sounding more like I should invest in lightroom (not that much $) and use GIMP in place of Photoshop (a whole lot of $$). Thanks for chiming in!

Gomer wrote in post #15663555
It is sounding more like I should invest in lightroom (not that much $) and use GIMP in place of Photoshop (a whole lot of $$). Thanks for chiming in!

I gotta say that if you can afford LR, which is pretty reasonably priced as far as Adobe products go, it really is an amazing piece of software. I have CS6 for pixel level editing, but LR is all I need for 95% of my images (maybe more). I mainly use CS6 for photo restoration and removing blemishes, stray hairs or distracting elements.

For LR all of your edits to your RAW files are stored as records in a database, and you can make lots of virtual copies to show the same RAW file edited multiple ways ... all without creating any jpegs or TIFs. If you upload to Zenfolio, Smugmug, Facebook and others you can upload images without ever creating an actual jpeg ... or you can print to your own printer, again without creating a jpeg. It's just such a logical way of managing your digital files and will really improve your workflow. I've owned LR since November and while I've uploaded thousands of images to my Smugmug account since then (I didn't shoot thousands ... most were re-edits ) and I made a lot of prints, but I only have 8 jpegs on my hard drive that I exported.

To use an external editor you just have to right click on an image and tell it to open in the other program. You then complete your edits, which would then have to be saved to a jpeg, TIF or PSD type file (for CS6 it has to be PSD or TIF).

I'm totally burnt out from two pretty hard weeks at work so hopefully the above helps and doesn't come of as a bunch of gibberish

Makes sense. Thanks for typing that out Bob Go rest!

Gomer, this should help you decide which calibrator

http://www.gamutprints​.com/2012/04/i...-quick-review/