Product Reviews

The curiously-named ColorMunki Design is a chunky white box, with one corner rounded off, a bag with a weighted tether and ColorMunki Design software. The device itself is what's used to profile the display or printer, and measure colour from any source, whether printed calibration swatches or your favourite shirt.

The screen profiling process is simple. It requires the ColorMunki to be put in the supplied bag, with the weighted handle helping it hang in position. The process of measuring the display only takes a minute, and the profile this creates - which is quite detailed and precise despite the speed of creation - is saved and set automatically.

Printer profiling is similarly well handled, although you'll need to use the ColorMunki software to measure the colours yourself once it is printed. Existing printer profiles made by ColorMunki can be fine-tuned by printing and sampling an optimisation chart.

All this is more than enough to earn it a good rating, but what sets ColorMunki Design apart from other profiling devices isn't its scope - although the ability to profile displays, projectors and prints is impressive. It's the sheer usefulness of the ColorMunki Design software.

As well as running and managing the regular profiling processes, it also helps users create palettes of colours, save them as colour libraries for use in Creative Suite and QuarkXPress, and even share them

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with other users around the world.

In the Libraries section you get three libraries by default: Color Groups, Munsell Glossy and Pantone Goe Coated. When you register, you also get Pantone Solid Coated, Matte and Uncoated. Selecting a colour from one of the libraries shows it in a grid and a coverflow-style array; plus name, Lab and sRGB make up; and related monochromatic, analagous, split complement, triadic and complement colours. In addition, you get variations (lighter, darker, more vibrant and so on) and 'similar' colours from the different libraries.

All this is highly impressive, but what really makes this useful is its ability to create a custom colour palette of a dozen colours from any image you supply. Use your iPhoto library or just drop a bitmap image into the window and you'll be given 12 colours taken from the most prominent hues and shades in the graphic. Save these palettes as-is or combine colours from different ones into the perfect set before exporting them. You can also click-sample the colour of any physical object you like, and compare and match it across multiple colour libraries. ColorMunki also lets you 'proof' your colours with different lighting conditions and print characteristics.

The export function can produce a colour palette in various forms, depending on your needs. As well as basic comma-separated, you can choose the X-Rite Color Exchange File v2.0 format (for other users of X-Rite products), the Quark Color Library format (creating a .qcl file), and the Adobe Color (.aco) and Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) formats. Exported colour sets worked perfectly in Illustrator and Photoshop CS3, and QuarkXPress 7, although QuarkXPress 8 had problems.

The hiccup with QuarkXPress 8 aside, this is an exceptional tool. In fact, the colour swatch functionality is so useful that designers would be happy to keep their screen profiled in order to have this software. It isn't cheap, but it is absolutely the most compelling profiling device we've seen.