Studio Practice
"It looked nothing like this on your monitor." Nine times out of ten both of you were looking at the same file and neither of you was wrong.
The most common complaint in commercial photography has nothing to do with focus or composition. A client orders prints from a packshot or product shoot, the prints come back, and the client calls to say the colour is off. The files looked right on your screen. They looked right on the client's laptop. The printer says his machine ran to specification. All three statements can be true at once, because an uncalibrated screen is a measuring instrument that measures itself.
Colour management is the least glamorous thing a studio can charge for and one of the few that measurably reduces reprints, refunds and the phone calls that eat a Tuesday. This is the workflow I use on product and packshot work, in order.
Everything downstream depends on the screen. A colorimeter, meaning a hardware probe that reads the colours your monitor actually displays, costs less than a single reshoot and takes ten minutes to run. Software-only "calibration" apps guess at your panel's behaviour and are not worth running on a working machine.
Practical settings for photography work: D65 white point, 120 cd/m2 brightness for a normally lit room, gamma 2.2. Brightness is the setting people get wrong most often. A monitor at full brightness next to a bright window looks normal to your eye and prints dark, because your eye has adapted to the glare. Recalibrate monthly, or weekly if the studio runs six or more hours a day, because panels drift with age.
One monitor, one light condition. If you edit on a laptop in three different rooms, you have three different colour references and no way to know which one the client's equipment resembles.
Include a grey card or colour target in the first frames of every lighting setup. It costs one frame and it anchors everything. A white balance picked off a grey card under your actual studio lights beats an auto white balance every time, and it gives you a reference when the client questions a tint six months later. A card read mid-grey under the light the product was actually photographed in is a statement of fact about the shoot; the auto setting is a guess the camera made in a fraction of a second.
Soft proofing means loading the printer's or press's ICC profile into your editing software and previewing what the file will look like when that specific device reproduces it. It takes seconds and it is the difference between telling a client the proof looks accurate and knowing it does.
A colour-managed delivery is not just the images. Include the camera's raw white balance reference frame if the client's designer will rework the files, deliver sRGB JPEGs for review alongside the working files, and state the profiles used in a one-line readme. For product work going to print, I deliver a small proof JPEG rendered through the press profile so the client sees the gamut-limited version before the plates are made. On the commercial side this is priced work, not a courtesy; it sits alongside the shooting rates on the rates page.
Most colour disputes are expectation disputes. The client's laptop screen, uncalibrated and set to a vivid profile, is what their whole team will judge the images on, and nothing in your studio changes that. So say it in advance: state that files are delivered colour-managed, explain that their display may render the same file differently, and recommend they approve colour on a print proof, not on a screen. Done before delivery it reads as expertise. Done after the complaint it reads as an excuse.
The same logic applies to artwork and reprographic commissions, where the original sits next to the reproduction and every colour shift is visible. The repro side is covered in detail in photographing artwork for catalogues and reproduction.
Calibrate the monitor with hardware, shoot a grey card under the actual lights, soft proof against the destination profile, deliver sRGB for screens and managed profiles for print, and set the client's expectations before the files leave. None of it is expensive, all of it is dull, and it removes the one class of complaint that no amount of photographic skill can fix after the fact.