Today I got to meet Kim Herrera an Adobe Certified Expert Photoshop CS CTT+ Trainer. Wow that sure is a long title! Long explanation short, she is a "color specialist".
There are a couple monitors at work that are not consistent in color so we called her in to calibrate and set up color profiles for our monitors. She is not only extremely knowledgeable and friendly, but really good at explaining things in simple english. I love it when techy people are able to break things down in layman's terms. That's when you know that they really know their shiet and do not need to impress you with technical jargon.
Two hours later we have perfectly calibrated monitors and she educated me on maintenance. Here are some nerdy highlights from our meeting:
She introduced me to this amazing Pantone reading hand held device called the Pantone Color Cue
. We had a yellow tshirt lying nearby and she picked it up, placed the device on the fabric, pushed a button and magically a PMS color number displayed on the LCD screen along with the RGB and CMYK conversions. Another useful tool that I haven't seen since college was the Pantone Color Bridge set
. This was useful because if you didn't want to buy the handheld device you can manually compare the colors by using the Pantone "flash cards" as I like to call them. Buying them separately is expensive so if you want to make the investment I recommend buying the two in the Pantone Plus Series Set
. Overall it was a very informative session, I was very pleased to learn how to maintain color calibration on our monitors and also re-introduced to using Pantone colors for accurate color reference. Kim has some useful video tutorials introducing some tips and tricks of Photoshop that I found very helpful. I hope our paths cross again and for sure I will subscribe to her YouTube channel. Check out her blog out at Xone10.com.
