Colour Management is often portrayed like insurance: some kind of necessary evil which we'd all be better off without, but can't quite figure out what to put in its place. Its not well understood what it is or what it does. Its generally felt that things were better 'before colour management' although nobody can really point to a comparable situation to the cottage publishing industries that the digital era has opened up. Because of this most people try their best to 'remove' the colour management as much as is possible - as it is that that is causing their colour and tone shifts, and not the complexity of the printer set up and the general level of ignorance. In other words these people are colour management passive-aggressive.

This is what was highlighted to me - in fact, it is the foundational fact that I have distilled from reading Time Grey's Color Confidence. To give another example, with a lot of people, they either 'turn off' color management in photoshop - "don't color manage" when opening a page, or they "preserve embedded profiles". This when you are viewing information on screen is a bad idea. The first gives you the impression that you are viewing the 'pure' image when you are in fact viewing using the default colour settings; and the second gives you the idea that are staying true to the color profiled image, when you are in fact generating a conflict between the profile in the image and the profile that the monitor uses. You can no more turn off profiling that you can speak without using a language. The idea that you can have a pure image (sans profile) is in this sense the same as saying that you can speak the maker's language. Saying that the computer can't deal with your color problems whilst feeding it bad information is, you will find in the chapters, a problem that you can deal with and grow beyond. Tim Grey's is your personal colour counsellor, and he'll help you deal with your color attitude.

Its a book that lays out several variant systems, tells you what to do, doesn't dwell too much on the technical matters and will get you making better looking images. It won't tell you a great deal about the way colour space works, but it will give you enough to know what to do. I like Tim, he's a pragmatic sort of guy, so it seems, and I like his book, too.