accurate color for prof lab printing – how to?

R
Posted By
Roberto
Sep 5, 2005
Views
227
Replies
3
Status
Closed
Photoshop 7
Win XP Pro
Sony G520 CRT

I’m trying to work on photos taken with a Canon digital and create a finished file that I plan to bring to a professional photo lab for printing.

I don’t want to print on my (cheap) color printer, because I really want a fine quality print which my printer is not capable of.

The more I examine the options, the more confused I get:

My Sony monitor provides all kinds of color temperature options as well as an sRGB option where there are no color temperature adjustments. How should I set the monitor?

Then, I tried creating an icc profile using the wizard but now I can’t figure out how to load it.

More importantly, I see that there is an option in Photoshop Image/assign profile. Here there are many options, and the option that says "don’t color manage".

I’ve tried to read the online help but I don’t understand enough to have it be helpful.

Might someone be able to explain some of this to me and/or to point me to sites which would help someone who doesn’t understand it very well.

TIA

Louise

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S
Skuby
Sep 5, 2005
Louise pounded on the keyboard and wrote:

Photoshop 7
Win XP Pro
Sony G520 CRT

I’m trying to work on photos taken with a Canon digital and create a finished file that I plan to bring to a professional photo lab for printing.

I don’t want to print on my (cheap) color printer, because I really want a fine quality print which my printer is not capable of.
The more I examine the options, the more confused I get:
My Sony monitor provides all kinds of color temperature options as well as an sRGB option where there are no color temperature adjustments. How should I set the monitor?

Then, I tried creating an icc profile using the wizard but now I can’t figure out how to load it.

More importantly, I see that there is an option in Photoshop Image/assign profile. Here there are many options, and the option that says "don’t color manage".

I’ve tried to read the online help but I don’t understand enough to have it be helpful.

Might someone be able to explain some of this to me and/or to point me to sites which would help someone who doesn’t understand it very well.

TIA

Louise,

You might want to ask this same question on:

rec.photo.digital

Good luck

Brian

———————————————————— —————– Brian J. Rueger | Hampton Div. of Fire & Rescue | "Who dares wins" Lt./Paramedic | Fire Communications Officer | Hampton, VA.
B.S. Comm/I/SEL Pilot | MSgt, USAF (Ret.) 49199 | NREMT-P
Check out my home page: http://members.cox.net/brueger
Some of my photography: http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/34185.html "Life’s too short to drink LITE beer!"
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C
Clyde
Sep 5, 2005
Louise wrote:
Photoshop 7
Win XP Pro
Sony G520 CRT

I’m trying to work on photos taken with a Canon digital and create a finished file that I plan to bring to a professional photo lab for printing.

I don’t want to print on my (cheap) color printer, because I really want a fine quality print which my printer is not capable of.
The more I examine the options, the more confused I get:
My Sony monitor provides all kinds of color temperature options as well as an sRGB option where there are no color temperature adjustments. How should I set the monitor?

Then, I tried creating an icc profile using the wizard but now I can’t figure out how to load it.

More importantly, I see that there is an option in Photoshop Image/assign profile. Here there are many options, and the option that says "don’t color manage".

I’ve tried to read the online help but I don’t understand enough to have it be helpful.

Might someone be able to explain some of this to me and/or to point me to sites which would help someone who doesn’t understand it very well.

TIA

Louise

Color management is complicated and not very intuitive at the beginning. There are Web sites and books that explain this somewhat to very well. I remember that Adobe’s Web site has something on it. Here is Clyde’s nutshell version:

Color management is the science of knowing how all your devices handle color and then translating between them. ICC/ICM profiles are the definitions of how your devices handle color. Photoshop does the translating.

In short, you need to have a profile for your monitor and each type of paper that you print on your printer. (Some also say your camera and scanner too.) If your monitor is calibrated properly, then you can edit the picture to look the way you want it to. Of course, you can always edit it anyway, but you will never get it translated correctly to anything else if you don’t have a monitor profile. So, color management starts with a properly calibrated monitor.

Since your monitor color handling is now known, Photoshop takes your file and translates that to how your printer will print on that particular paper. The colors then look pretty darn close to what you saw on the screen. This is because Photoshop knows what the colors are in the file and it reads the profile of the paper (on that printer).

Color Spaces aren’t the same thing as Color Profiles. Profiles define how a device handles color. Color Spaces define how we are talking about color. AdobeRGB tells the translator that we are dealing with a definition of color that is a bit broader than how sRGB defines it. ProPhotoRGB would be dealing with an even broader range of colors. You may or (probably) may not be able to see all these colors on your monitor or printer. However, the translator needs to know how broad your color definition is to be able to pull it in the usable range of the device that it is translating to.

The next question is how to do the translating. With Photoshop there are two ways. You can have Photoshop do it or you can have the printer driver do it. While Adobe recommends having Photoshop do it, either way seems to work well. What you can’t do is have both do it; that will always give you screwy colors. It would be like translating twice.

When you press <ctrl><alt>P the first box that pops up is Photoshop’s start of the printing. Here is where you tell it if you want it to color manage or if you want the printer driver to color manage. If you want Photoshop to color manage, you much select the paper profile for the paper you are using. When you click on "Print" it takes you to the Printer Driver’s dialog box. If you selected a paper profile in the last box, you need to select "Do not Manage" here in the printer driver settings. If you didn’t select a profile in Photoshop’s box, you need to select one here.

If your monitor is correctly calibrated and you save the Color Space profile with the file, then any properly calibrated device that gets that file after should be able to translate it properly. Inside Photoshop, you never use the file that is your monitor profile. The monitor profile gets used by editing on the monitor.

In summary… Calibrate your monitor. Then everything you edit in Photoshop using that monitor will have a known definition of color. Save the file with the color space that you used. After that any printer/paper combination with a profile will be able to print your file properly.

If you are printing the file yourself, select the paper profile in the first box and tell the Printer Driver to "Do not Manage" in its 2nd box.

If the file will be printed somewhere else, check to see if they are using good printer/paper profiles. You don’t need to do anything else. Most pro printing shops spend a lot of trouble making sure everything is calibrated. It shouldn’t be a problem. Even if I printed your file on my system, I would use whatever profile that fit the paper that I was using. It should look like what you saw on your calibrated monitor.

————————–

A note on how to calibrate devices…. If you have a CRT, you can use the Adobe Gamma program to get a pretty good adjustment of your monitor. It won’t be exact, because you are using your own visual judgment to do the calibrating. That’s always subjective. Subjective will give you close, but not exact results. It may even be way off.

If you can, buy a calibrating device. I bought the ColorVision Spyder2 and am very glad I did. With Adobe Gamma, I was close, but always had pictures that weren’t quite right coming off my printer. Now, I hardly think about it and certainly don’t have to fight it. It cost me about $150 at B&H Photo. There other options, but I doubt you’ll find one this inexpensive.

I download paper profiles for the papers I use on my Epson R800. Epson’s are pretty darn close and close enough for me. Ilford’s profiles are spot on for me. I also use proprietary papers from InkJetArt and they have profiles for my printer. Their’s are very good too. Some people do their own calibrating of papers, but I don’t find it worth the trouble. If you use a paper that doesn’t have a profile, I would recommend using a profile service like Cathy’s Profiles: http://www.cathysprofiles.com/

Files from cameras and scanners have to go through your monitor during the editing process. Therefore, their colors will be corrected during the editing on your calibrated monitor. So, don’t worry about them – unless you will be printing directly from them.

Clyde
B
bmoag
Sep 6, 2005
Every little breeze seems to whisper, " Louise!You want better prints from your photo images. Prints that resemble what you thought you saw when you pressed the shutter."

Ah Louise, you want image proceesing and color management without the pain, learning curve and expense. Camera and printer manufacturers promise this but do not deliver.

They must all be men.

To paraphrase the bard, "The fault dear Louise lies not with our printers but with our lack of knowledge about how to process images in a color managed workflow."

Many mass market printers, e.g. Walmart, have sophisticated algorithms that key in on black, white and grey levels and deliver prints that many users are satisfied with. Flat, reasonably accurate colors, boring beyond description. Often better than what consumers are used to from film originals.
However those cyaner than blue skies are not enough for a sophisticated consumer like Louise. I hope not, anyway.
As much as I hate Walmart this is not their fault: a straight print from a digital or film original is NEVER EVER the best print possible. In fact a straight print from whatever original source is rarely a good print and is a requisite only for journalism and crime scene/evidence photography.

A truly professional printer will look at your image and globally balance the color to his/her satisfaction using his/her color managed system. In truth this is not difficult (it takes about two seconds) once you understand the process and have the not very expensive minimal equipment required to calibrate at least your computer monitor. Once an image is entered into a color managed system the rest, if done properly, is set in color managed concrete.

Unless you discuss what you want with the printing service and are prepared to pay for it, if they provide the service, this does not mean they will retouch the image to eliminate shiny noses/foreheads, change color or tone in regions of the image, boost saturation globally or regionally, etc. If things like this matter to you then learn how to use layers in Elements/Photoshop/PaintshopPro/Photopaint.

Did I mention software control of sharpening?

These are not printer issues, they are issues in the original image, now more doable than ever thanks to the wonders of digital image manipulation.

Preparing the image for printing in a color managed environment like Photoshop is the digital equivalent of all the machinations Ansel Adams et al performed in the wet darkroom. Did you ever see films of the ballet dances he did to dodge and burn his black and white enlargements?

In fact, because I have done this even with Canon printers (which I hate), I would bet that your "cheap" printer could deliver images of a quality you never expected if you processed those images optimally with a color managed workflow.

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