Pantone’s ColorMunki now lets you create color palettes and import them easily into QuarkXPress 7/8, Adobe’s Creative Suite 3/4, and Corel Painter X.

But what is ColorMunki? I would describe it as a name for a family of software and hardware that lets you profile (calibrate) your displays and work quite creatively with color palettes. The more expensive ColorMunki Design ($499) adds the ability to measure color from any surface, including paper, fabric, and walls.

The less expensive ColorMunki Create and Photo ($149) is limited to measuring color on your display.

Version 1.1 of the software features multiple improvements that are based on feedback from professional users. For example:

• Optimized Display profiling: ColorMunki now offers the ability to optimize display luminance based on either ambient light measurements or user specified luminance values.
• User-defined ambient light levels: allows users to see actual ambient light levels, giving detailed luminance value information to make any appropriate changes to the work environment before calibrating.
• Precise control of display luminance:  target and actual measured luminance values now displayed while adjusting display luminance, ensuring total accuracy of this function.
• ColorMunki 1.1 also offers the option for automatic video LUT adjustments, for more exacting control over luminance display levels.
• Optimized display contrast and brightness (backlight) workflow: ColorMunki’s all-new automated contrast-clipping test provides a user-adjusted contrast option for an assured easier and faster workflow.
• Greater flexibility in display profile naming:  users also have the ability to change the display profile name before saving and applying a new profile, so they can easily identify profiles if they want to change or switch when adjusting for different ambient conditions and color temperatures.
• Automatically import and export palettes in QuarkXPress 8.

Jay Nelson

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.