From Apple.com
Preparing your Apple Cinema Display
The first step in good virtual color proofing is verify what you see on your Apple Cinema Display — it’s the window into everything you do. This means that your display must be properly calibrated and profiled to ensure that what you see on screen matches what you and your clients will see in virtual proof and final output.
Mac OS X Tools for Display Calibration and Profiling
When you connect a display, let it warm up for about 30 minutes and turn off any energy savers that might dim or blank the screen. Your Macintosh will automatically query your display for industry-standard information. Based on this data, ColorSync automatically creates and assigns a factory display profile. This means every Mac running Mac OS X 10.3 (or later versions) can display color accurately without any effort on your part. For even better color results, consider calibrating and creating a custom profile for your particular display.
A calibration sequence makes sure the display behaves consistently before profiling. The display is told to produce a series of colors in sequence. Each color is measured to compare the requested color with the actual color displayed. The results are saved in the correct system location automatically.
Once your display is calibrated, you can create a custom ICC profile for it.
You can accomplish both of these steps using the Display Calibrator Assistant built into Mac OS X Tiger. Enhancements to the new Display Calibrator give you more control over customizing the color space profile of Apple displays.
To use the Display Calibrator Assistant, go to System Preferences and select Displays. Click the Color tab and then the Calibrate button to view the Display Calibrator Assistant screen. Check the Expert Mode box. Click Continue.
The onscreen directions walk you through the calibration and profiling process. At the end, you can name and save a custom profile for your display.
You should calibrate and profile your display about once a month, because ambient conditions and the color on your display can change.
Taking Good Calibration to the Next Level
For the ultimate in color accuracy, consider investing in a hardware device for calibrating and profiling your display such as the MonacoOPTIXxr hardware and software, the GretagMacbeth Eye-One Display, which works in conjunction with GretagMacbeth’s Eye-One Match software, or the Spyder2 ProStudio 2.0. MonacoOPTIX, a colorimeter, calibrates, and profiles your display by mimicking how the human eye sees the color on your display. The Eye-One Display is an affordable spectrophotometer that attaches to your monitor and measures and defines the color on your display. The Spyder2 PRO Studio includes a highly sensitive colorimeter that lets you easily calibrate all of your displays, including projection devices.
Onscreen help in both software packages guides you through the process of calibrating and profiling your display using hardware devices. The software offers predefined settings and automated processes if you don’t want to develop customized settings. Or experienced users can create their own custom settings for brightness, white point, and contrast using Advanced Mode. Once the profiling kit has calibrated your display and created a custom profile, Mac OS X makes your display’s custom profile accessible throughout your system to all of your applications.
Now, ask your clients to calibrate their displays so that they, too, can trust the color they’re viewing exactly matches your intent.
Get more information about solutions from GretagMacbeth, X-Rite, and ColorVision by Datacolor.
Embedding a Profile
Once you and your clients can mutually trust what you see on your displays, it’s time to “tag” your image or layout with an output device profile for the printer, proofer or other device. You can acquire this device profile from your commercial printer.
When you get the device profile, install it in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles and ask your clients to do the same. Essentially, tagging an image means that you’ve digitally embedded the color profile describing the output device into the image file. Once you’ve tagged the image, then you are actually viewing a soft proof virtual press printout of the final output, right on your screen.
Now you can easily create a virtual proof by converting the color in the source document or image to reflect the color capabilities specified by the profile of your output device. The following pages show steps to follow in both editing and imaging applications.
. 