From Certification to Canvas: A Photographer’s Color Management Journey

Nathaniel Morrow

When you say the term “color management” in the printing industry, you’ll probably get mixed reactions. Most know the challenges that color poses to printing (and the equally challenging headaches they cause), but they also understand the importance of getting it right.

But every now and then, you have people that get really excited about color management. Nathaniel Morrow, a fine art photographer and artist based in New York City, is one of those people. His day job is with a nonprofit, which also happens to engage with the printing industry, but as a photographer specializing in abstract “lensless” imagery, he loves honing his color management skills for creative and personal reasons.

Nathaniel’s relentless pursuit of education has led him to all types of platforms, but it was attending a PRINTING United Expo a few years ago that he first came across the iLEARNING+ platform.

A Self-Taught Path into Printing and Color

Around six years ago, Nathaniel was hired at a major nonprofit, where he gets plenty of exposure to the printing industry. At the time, they had a digital press as well as basic cutting and binding equipment. He had to do a lot of reading and research to learn how everything worked.

Luckily, he’s always felt a natural draw toward all things technical. “I really like getting into the guts of machines and figuring out how things work,” he explains.

On the fine arts side of the equation, Nathaniel notes that he has been a photographer on and off since 2008 when he received what he describes as his “first real camera.” But it’s only been in the past three years that he’s gotten serious about it. That pursuit also requires a thorough understanding of printing, specifically color management.

“[Around] 2024, I started going out and doing street photography,” he says. “I started diving into abstract and once I started getting into [that] is when I got really serious about color and about print.”

Nathaniel Morrow loves exploring abstract photogprahy, with a specific focus on what he calls "lensless" photography. All images courtesy Nathaniel Morrow

His desire to learn and push boundaries spearheaded the vigorous pursuit to achieve the best possible print outcome. “Once you start pushing the limits of photographic and screen technology, you start running into a lot of issues with reproducing that print, because there's really only so far you can go before you run up against limitations,” Nathaniel explains. “I got really interested in researching the physics of that and optical design, and a lot of really niche questions about what's possible and the most bleeding-edge technologies.”

Over the course of the last few years, his nonprofit job and serious endeavor into photography landed him at a PRINTING United Expo. Not only has his nonprofit company purchased equipment from show exhibitors, but there was something else that caught his eye.

Turning Industry Resources into Personal Creative Growth

Nathaniel has turned to a variety of platforms, such as YouTube, for learning. When attending the Expo a couple years ago, he saw a banner for iLEARNING+. “I saw some of the advertisements for the platform at the conference, and I thought, I bet there's stuff that we can use there,” he says. When he started exploring it, he landed on the Color Management Professional certifications. So, he took advantage of the opportunity and now has the Color Management Professional: Master Print certification.

“It's a really useful primer on all the technologies out there and all of the things you have to consider, because you don't realize what you don't know,” he notes.

And now that Nathaniel has his very own Canon Pro 1100 for his photography, he can apply the knowledge across multiple channels. “I’ve been interested in color management for a while,” he says. “I find it really fascinating. I love seeing the results. And I figured, if I am going to really master this, if I am going to really try to find the limits, then I need the next level of knowledge, and this [certification] seemed like a good fit for that.”

This is especially true for the type of photography Nathaniel does, which he describes as “lensless.”

“I literally take the lens off the camera,” he explains. “I use a bare sensor and shape the light that hits that so it can produce these incredibly vivid and saturated colors that even screens have difficulty reproducing because they are so bright and unsaturated.”

This approach gets him excited, but it also helps him push the boundaries, which is also where the iLEARNING+ knowledge comes in. “I’m really interested in the absolute limits of technology, like when you do stuff it's not designed to do, and then you just see what happens,” he says. “The course was really useful in understanding what the standards are.”

Pushing the Boundaries of Color

While Nathaniel pulled a lot of use from the Master Print certification when it comes to understating color management, he also found a few other benefits. First up, he gained exposure to a lot of printing terminology he didn’t necessarily know beforehand.

“There [are] a lot of things where it's like, I know this concept, but I don't know what it is formally called,” he says. “Now, I have a vocabulary.”

But he also came away with the ability to achieve consistent results, which is always a big challenge when it comes to color management. “As far as practical end result terms, I can just print things that are a lot closer to what I have on the screen,” he explains. “The moment I realized that I really achieved something is when I had an image on my screen, and I printed a proof, held them up next to each other, just at the light temperature, and they were identical. And that felt like a real achievement.”

Looking ahead to the future, not only does Nathaniel plan to take more courses, he also hopes to share his knowledge with others. “It's just a great way to advance work, and personally, in other consulting environments, it's something that I can offer to people,” he says. “I've grown gradually into this world — I pick up a little bit of knowledge here and there, and then suddenly, someone asks me a question. I respond instinctively. I'm like, how can I have the answer to that? And it's just fun to be in that position … to be able to tell them, here's how you do this, here's why you do this, and here's what the results look like.”