Colour managed work flow videos and books

[nospe7880]

Hello,

I am looking to get a fuller understanding of how to set up my iMac and Epson 7880 printer to allow me to use a colour managed work flow from camera through to final printed image.
Are there any particularly good videos or books that cover this subject especially with regards to colour settings etc in PHOTOSHOP / LIGHTROOM?

I think that I am nearly there with it all but really would like some solid reference material to make sure.

Thanks in advance


Bernard

[Manfred M]

I've never run across a book with this information. In fact, it would be difficult to write more than a couple of pages on the whole subject. Unfortunately, the internet is full of both good and bad information. What part of colour managed workflow are you having trouble understanding?

Don't forget all that a colour managed workflow does for you is to ensure that the colours are passed from one device to the next as accurately as possible. Correct white balance, exposure, colour space, rendering intents, etc. are outside of what this approach will do for the photographer.

[Shadowman]

I think Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins "Fine Art Printing for Photographers" is a good text to start with, granted specifics of your printer will come from the documentation included; as you reference the Epson 7880 it will be referenced in the 3rd edition.

[nospe7880]

Hi Manfred,
I am about to use my ColorMunki Photo to calibrate my 5K iMac and then my Epson 7880. This should give me ICC profiles for them.

It is how to set up Photoshop colour settings that is my area of concern. I understand that the prints and the monitor won't ever be exactly the same due to the different ways that they present the image. (emissive against reflective) but I do want them to be more in line than they are at present so that I can have more confidence that the final printed image will closely represent what I see on screen.
Its when I hear about things like colour spaces, convert to profile and assigning profiles that I get most worried. I have watched a couple of video tutorials by Andrew Rodney (aka The Digital Dog ) and these seem to make most sense so far. Hope that you understand where I am coming from.

[DanK]

Bernard,

The last paragraph of Manfred's post is the ideal starting point.

First, independent of using ICCs, you have to calibrate your monitor for accurate color rendition. I'll assume you have done that. If not, it's step one.

As Manfred explained, most of what you do in editing doesn't depend on ICCs, if by that you mean the ICC profiles specific to a printer and a paper. These only come into play when you print.

I print from Lightroom. Here are the relevant steps in my workflow. This assumes that you have installed the ICC profile you will need for the specific combination of printer and paper that you will use for that particular print.

1. Edit without regard to ICCs.
2. Create a soft proof copy using the relevant profile. Edit that to taste. The amount of editing needed depends in the paper--generally less with luster, more with matte.
3. Switch to the print module.
4. At the bottom right, in the print job panel, go to color management and use the drop-down menu to replace "managed by printer" with the profile you want to use. (This assumes you are printing in color. If you are printing in B&W, some printers will produce better results using the printer's firmware.)

That's it. Of course, there are many other aspects of printing from LR, such as figuring out (by trial and error) what settings you want under "print adjustment", but those aren't relevant to the use of ICCs.

Dan

[Manfred M]

Before starting the screen calibration process, you should do two things:

1. Confirm that the screen is at least 100% sRGB compliant or better yet be close to 99% or better Adobe RGB compliant. As you are working with an iMac, the good news is that Apple screens are 100% sRGB compliant. The 5K buys you little when it comes to image retouching.

2. Verify that your workspace is acceptable for this type of work. The maximum brightness at your workstation should be 70 lux. I use my Sekonic flash meter to measure my work area, which is in a basement office, so the lighting levels are consistent throughout the day (40 lux in my case). The main reason for this is to ensure that your computer screen has a contrast ratio of 1000:1 or better, under working conditions.

Use your Colormunki to calibrate and profile your screen. Make sure that the brightness is in the 80 - 120 candela / square meter range. In my case, I have found that when I have set my screen to 100 candela / square meter, I get the desired brightness on my prints on my Epson 3880 with no other adjustments required during the print prep process. The usual issue I hear about is prints coming out too dark, and that means the computer screen is set too bright.

Once this calibration and profiling operations has been completed, let the xRite software save the new profile and make sure that it is loaded when you start up your computer. As long as you do not touch your display controls on your screen, everything should be fine. I reprofile my system once every three months, every time I update my video card drivers, simply because I don't know if anything has been reset during driver updates. I have the advantage of using a workstation graphics card, so these drivers are only updated four times a year. Your iMac uses a consumer level card and I am not sure how Apple deploys its updates, so that is something for you to look into. In theory, unless you have something that is going wrong with either the graphics card or the screen on your computer, frequent re-calibration / profiling that had to be done at least monthly on the old CRT (picture tube) displays is really not necessary.

I don't do my own paper profiles. I don't print enough to justify the small quality gain I would get in using a photocolorimeter like the one you own, so I stick with the paper manufacturer's profiles. These are specific to the printer / ink and paper. As you are planning to do your own, you will have a bit more flexibility there and you could see a gain of around 5% in colour accuracy over what I get. Just follow the instructions that came with your equipment to make and read the test strip. If you are super concerned here, do a new one every time you change out an ink cartridge or print on a new roll of paper that is from a different manufacturing lot. I personally find that the quality control on Epson inks is excellent and I can't notice any colour differences when I change cartridges. The same is true for paper from the well known paper manufacturers.

Load that profile that you have created (use a naming convention that allows you to identify it) and the xRite software should save it in the correct folder so that you can access it when you are ready to print.

Getting away from the mechanics of printing for a few moments and discuss colour spaces. The three most commonly used colour spaces are sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB. At a high level, sRGB can display around 30% of visible colours, Adobe RGB is around 50% and ProPhoto is around 90%. Adobe Lightroom uses a variant of ProPhoto as its working colour space. That should tell you something about which one you should be using for most of your editing work; there are some good solid technical reasons for doing so that I won't get into here. If you do use ProPhoto, make sure you are working in 16-bit colour otherwise you can see artifacts in your edits, especially if you are pushing the colours hard. It is less important to do so in sRGB and even in AdobeRGB.

Your printer is actually a variant of a CMYK device, but photo printers should be looked at as RGB devices, so don't use that colour space for output on your 7880. It will really mess up your colours.

Anything that you set up for display on the internet should be converted to sRGB. Most commercial photo printers also use that colour space; this is because most of them do not use ink jet printers and the production photo printers are actually sRGB devices. As you are doing your own prints on a colour photo printer, you should be using Adobe RGB for final output. Your working colour space when you do your raw conversions should be ProPhoto and downsample to the appropriate colour space as a final step in your workflow.

One other consideration when using colour spaces; every time you convert to a narrower colour space, you are potentially throwing away colour data. It's a one-way path. Down conversion should be one of the last steps you take in your workflow. While Photoshop will let you take an sRGB image and convert it to Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, there is no way to restore the data that has been lost to the wider colour space.

One final consideration before we get back to printing; rendering intents. While our cameras can record any colours that humans can see, our display devices (computer screens, phones, tablets and printers) cannot. Any colour that cannot be reproduced accurately is referred to as being "out-of-gamut" (OOG) for that device. While there are four different rendering intents in common use, photographers only need to be concerned with two of them; relative colormetric and perceptual. The other two are primarily used in graphics work.

The operating system, through the display driver, controls how the rendering intents are applied to the displays. The RIP (Raster Image Processor) takes care of it for the printers. Relative Colormetric is the default rendering intent for our displays. What happens here is that any out of gamut colours are remapped to the "hull" or edge of the colour space of the display device. There are no changes made to the colours that are in-gamut. Perceptual works differently by redistributing all of the out of gamut colours proportionately through the colour space. This can result in tonal values that more accurately represent what was in the original scene, but at the cost of colour shifts. I use relative colormetric most of the time in printing, especially when getting the colours that are in gamut are critical; for instance for portraits and associated skin tone. I will use perceptual when this looks better; for instance I find that scenes of cityscape or Christmas lights are often more attractive using that rendering intent. I made those determinations while soft-proofing before printing.

Back to printing....

You had mentioned that you are aware that our computer screens are additive colour, transmitted light, RGB devices, while prints are subtractive colour, reflected light, CMYK products. There is one more key difference that you did not mention and that is the print medium itself. Most prints are made on paper and paper itself is far more yellow than the white on our computer screen; the paper base controls the brightest highlight colours (i.e. no white inks are used in printing, so the medium's base is as white as it gets. Paper manufacturers add optical brightening agents (OBA) to some papers to counteract the natural warm tones; but there are downsides to using paper with OBAs. Add to that the surface finish of the paper; glossy papers are more reflective than matte papers, so deep blacks tend to deeper on glossy paper because the light is not scattered as much as with matte or semi-matte papers.

In the following section, I am going to make some suggestions on my own workflow when printing; out of Photoshop. I leave the image itself alone and make a new "Print" folder on top of the layer stack where I do all my print tweaks. By turning that folder off and on, I can easily get back to my original image for other work.

Before printing, something you need to do is prepare the image for printing. You might want to do a bit of additional sharpening, after resizing the image to print size. There is a bit more ink spread on matte papers than glossy ones and varies from paper to paper. Test prints and experience are going to be the main drivers here. The only thing to remember is that you should enlarge to 100% of final size when you perform this operation.

While the colour gamut of a printer is going to be quite wide versus an sRGB screen, the number of colours will be limited by the dot size and number of ink colours your printer uses. Estimates I've seen suggest high end printers like yours will be capable of producing somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 distinct colours. This can cause issues in the shadow details and extreme highlights. In my print output folder, my top layer will be a levels adjustment layer. I will set the Output Levels to 12 on the left hand side slider and 242 on the right hand slider. I don't remember the math associated with this, but anything below 12 will print pure black and setting this value will ensure you will see some texture in the shadow detail. Note: If your profile supports "Black Point Compensation" you don't need to do this first step, but not all profiles do.

The process with setting the white output point to 242 (some people recommend 240), it will ensure some ink is deposited on these areas of the print, so specular highlights or blown out white detail (the sun or lights) will have a minimal amount of ink deposited on these areas of the print so that there are no "bald" areas. These bald areas can be very apparent in the final print as the finish of the paper without any ink reflects light differently than areas with ink.

The final step in my work flow is soft-proofing and associated changes to my image. This is an emulation step so is not 100% reflective of the actual print, but it is quite close. I do soft proofing in two steps.

Open the functionality in Photoshop's View menu. Select "Proof Setup" and select the "Custom" selection. You should see the custom print profile you created as one of the items, so select that, if you don't have a custom print profile made for a particular paper and have decided to use a manufacturer's profile that you have downloaded from the internet and installed on your computer, these can be found there as well. If the profile supports Black Point Compensation, then select it, if not, I have already covered off the work around earlier in this document. The "Preserve RGB Numbers" is not used in a colour managed workflow, so don't check that box. Look at how your your image looks with both the Perceptual and Relative Colormetric colour intents and pick the one that works best for your image. Clicking the "Preview" button will show you what the image will look like. I don't bother with the two "Display Options" at this point.

I now exit this screen and work with the next two options in the View Menu; by leaving the "Display Proof Colors" on, you can make adjustments to the image; I will sometimes boost the contrast via a curves adjustment layer and do other edits to tweak the look. The "Gamut Warning" will show you the areas of the image that are OOG. I generally let the rendering intent handle these, but in theory, I could edit these areas too.

At this point, I will go back to the Custom Profile setting and check the "Simulate Paper Color" and "Simulate Black Ink" buttons and could do a bit more tweaking, but I find that this emulation is not as reliable as the other, so usually don't.

At this point, especially if I am using a new paper I have no printing experience with, I will run a small sized test print of the image I am working on. Some people use a standard test print available from the internet, but I don't find that particularly useful as I am working on tweaking MY image, not some hypothetical test image. I might do a couple of test prints at this stage, tweaking various parameters. Doing test prints is something I did a lot of in the colour "wet darkroom" and still find this the best approach to fine tune my prints. It's cheap insurance when compared to the cost of doing a large print.

A couple of final thoughts; you should let the print dry for at least an hour, before evaluating the print. The drying ink does change the look and while the paper manufacturers often recommend a couple of hours, I find that one hour is sufficient. If you have the money to invest in a viewing booth you can either buy a professional one or build one with colour balanced 6500K lights. I find that diffuse light that is in the 5500K - 9000K range works fine for me; the colour shifts at higher colour temperatures are less critical than with lower ones. Just shoot a grey target that fills your viewfinder using AWB and see what colour temperature your camera says it is. As long as you are close, you should be fine.

If in doubt, do another test print

I hope this helps.

One other thing; you might want to have your colour vision checked. I get this done every couple of years by my optometrist. Certain medical conditions can affect your colour vision.

[Polar01]

Bernard, Manfred has written down a lot of great stuff, which I completely agree with. If you are looking for some info to read or video to watch I would suggest the Luminous Landscape website. I have found a lot of really good info on the site, it use to be free, now you have to pay, the cost is $12.00 US a year not really that much. The most you have to loose is $12.00 US.
I had some problems with Photoshop, uninstalled it, reinstalled it with preferences, no good, so I did everything again but installed with no previous preferences it worked. Only thing was I had to redo all my Photoshop colour management settings, so I just went into the Luminous Landscape and found the articles that I needed.

Cheers: Allan

[Manfred M]

I forgot there is one excellent colour management eBook (pdf) out there- it's written by photographer Ashley Karyl and there are a couple of short videos that come with it. It's not cheap, for an eBook, but is heavily discounted right now for the next few days, and yes, I've had it for a couple of years, but forgot all about it.

https://colourmanagementpro.com/

[Helly123]

I recently found in this thread a tip about the Fine Art Printing for Photographers book ... I bought it, read it, and ... it's one of the best books I've ever seen! Thank you very much for this advice! There is a lot of inspiration now.

[FinlayCole]

When I was a student, I almost always had bad grades, and I just had to read this book, but there was not enough time because of the study. And then I came across one great site, namely https://essayontime.com.au/java-assignment-help, which helped me completely figure it out. Java assignment help raised my average score incredibly, so I started always referring to this resource, I recommend it. And thanks to this, I managed to free myself a lot of time and read this wonderful book.

[Helly123]

Is she that good? Where did you buy it for yourself?

On Amazon. Take it too, you won't regret it, I guarantee.

[Manfred M]

Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins "Fine Art Printing for Photographers: Exhibition Quality Prints with Inkjet Printers Paperback" was at one time considered the "Gold Standard" as a fine art printing book. The most recent version, I believe camera out in 2013, so it is rather dated. While the principles are still accurate, the specifics, especially the ones dealing with specific papers and printers are not all that relevant. Much of what they wrote covers early versions of Photoshop and Lightroom and some of the key functionality has been updated.

Unfortunately, when it comes to printing, I am not aware of any good books on the subject that have come out after 2014.

There are a number of books (all with caveats) that I would go to before Fine Art Printing for Photographers.


1. Ansel Adams classic work - The Print. Definitely wet darkroom centric, but from a historical perspective, quite important as it has impacted how people look at the print.

2. Tom P. Ashe (2014) Color Managment and Quality Output is excellent for the advanced print maker

3. Color Management for Photographers (2005) by Andrew Rodney (a.k.a. The Digiital Dog) is also quite useful but dated.

4. The Digital Print (2014) by Jeff Schewe - written by someone who knows the subject very well and is highly respected.

There are few more, but these are even older...