"Double Color Management''

[Littlefield]

I get confused if you have same as source , printer driver on in Epson , then full color mang in PSE3 that is not double color mang because full color can accept both srgb and RGB . If you use ICC profiles that is where double color mang occurs right ?
Thanks
Don

[jlwilm]

Hi Don,

Well, its a little more complicated than that.

You get double color management when you leave your printer to manage its own stuff. If your printer is up to it, it is better to let Photoshop do its thing, and how you achieve that varies from printer to printer.

I got a reference today from a friend to Steves Digicams (http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/June_2005.html) web site that contains specific instructions for Canon printers. Epon's are similar, so you may find it useful.

Color management is a continuous process from shooting, viewing/editing and printing (or displaying on Web or monitor).

I have been researching this subject for some time and there is a lot of information out there, and a lot of it either contradictory or apparently contradictory.

[Littlefield]

Yea that is a good site I have read that before. I got a great print doing that because I usually have limited on with the printer driver same as source matches the monitor ,but I had full color mang with like I said and the print was fantastic so I can only surmise that since same as source was used that PSE3 let the printer handle all and that full color can accept both RGB and srgb.

I got an Email today from Epson that says the Epson Rx600 does not have these :
There are no paper specific ICC profiles available from Epson for the
Stylus Photo RX600. You may wish to look into third party source for
custom ICC profiles. Although we can troubleshoot individual Epson
products, support for third party ICC profiles must be handled by the
applicable providers.

But I have in Windows /sys 32/spool/ driver / color the Icc profles. !
LR will print the profile but PSE3 gives horrible washed out color .

This self-extracting file contains the PRINT Image Matching (P.I.M.) Plug-in v2.2 for Adobe® Photoshop® and the ICC profiles for the Epson Stylus Photo RX600.

I did that before is that a contradiction ?
Thanks
Don

[jlwilm]

Hi Don,

Don't know. I was back looking at the site and found a link to the similar article from the month before that dealt with Epson printers. Here it is (http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/May_2005.html).

My understanding is that in order to achieve this, the printer has to be able to turn its color managament over to a software application - such as Photoshop CS2/CS3/Elements. If your printer isn't on the list (assuming you can find it), your best bet may be to set your "Printer Profile" to "Printer Color Managament" - at least in this way, the printer will use whatever it came with to handle the job of printing.

My assumption is that this is why most people say that the "best" results are obtained with a manafacturers Ink, Paper and settings - becahus they are designed to work together. Once you start to stray from the golden path with 3rd party Inks and Papers, you either have to get lucky or find a paper supplier that has a profile for your printer.

You might try Red River Paper (http://www.redriverpaper.com/) or Dry Creek Photo (http://www.drycreekphoto.com/) for paper and ICC color profiles.

[Littlefield]

Thanks for links . For my Epson same as source also forwards to printer and it actually prints better color then printer mang . Both forward to printer so I do not understand why printer mang is a little darker . I guess it picks up PSE3 data while same as source is based more on the monitor profile and does not have the PSE3 color base atttached.

[TonyW]

The options are a bit confusing and I'm not sure I have it totally figured out but I have done some reading and got some tips from Colin the Codebreaker as well as experimented with my Epson R300 printer so here is my take on what the printer options do.

First off don't confuse monitor and printer profiles - they are different and shouldn't be mixed up. Elements is colour managed and documents have a working color space (usually sRGB or AdobeRGB) and the colours within those working spaces have RGB colour numbers. The colour numbers are different in the different working spaces (so it's important to know what the Source space is). If the monitor is correctly calibrated and profiled the monitor profile takes those numbers and the working colour space information and converts the numbers so the colors look right on the monitor.

Printing involves converting the RGB colour numbers to something the printer can make sense of and output the correct colours. It's more complicated than monitors since printers are CYMK and use various inks to get the end result. Also what the ink looks like depends on the paper so any profile needs to reflect both the specific printer and the specific paper being used.

If you use Same As Source, Elements just sends the RGB colour numbers to the printer with no information about the working space. If you were working in sRGB that will probably look reasonably OK since the printer driver is probably designed to work with sRGB colour numbers but if you were working in AdobeRGB the colours will look wrong (and probably dull).

If you use Printer Color Management, Elements sends both the colour numbers and the working space profile and the hope is that the Printer uses both of these to get things right. With my Epson printer driver if I check the ICM box and select the right paper then it does a pretty good job with either sRGB or AdobeRGB images.

The third way to print is to use a printer/paper profile specific to the printer and paper you're using. With my Epson R300 using Epson paper I have these from the PIM file downloaded from Epson (they show up called things like SPR300 Premium Glossy). When you use these, Elements does the conversion before sending the colour numbers to the printer. This only works if you turn colour management off in the printer driver by checking the No Color Adjustment box in the driver Advanced Settings. If you don't do that then you get double colour management - Elements does the conversion, the printer doesn't know that you've already done it so it does it again and that's when you get a mess.

Anyway that's the way I think it works for my printer (and different printers may well all work a bit differently). The key thing to realise is that you have to treat the monitor and printer separately. The monitor has to be calibrated and profiled and the printer has to be using the right settings in Elements and in the driver before you get a close match between what you see and what you get.

Actually I haven't found it makes much of a difference if I use Printer Color Management and check the ICM box in the printer driver (and select the right paper) or whether I use the Epson Printer/Paper Profile in Elements and turn off Color Management in the printer driver but that's likely because I'm using Epson paper. If I used third party paper I'd likely need to get the correct paper/printer profiles from the paper supplier and do the conversion in Elements.

Anyway that's the way I understand how it works - and if I've got anything wrong I'd like to know as there is a lot of mis-information floating around on the subject :)

Tony

[jlwilm]

Tony,

No Kidding. Wouldn't it be great if they had videos on color managament for geeks and/or a 21 day course - maybe even customzed to your printer brand.

I would sign up in a heartbeat. The info out there is confusing and contradictory.

How about it?

[grammom]

I am so glad you guys brought this up again. Ever since I got my new printer, I have been trying to figure this out. Every answer is different. I'm so confused now--my head is about to explode. :eek:
My prints are coming out too dark on my Epson R1800. I bought a monitor calibrator--still doesn't print what I'm seeing. Can someone, please, suggest a really good website that will take me from start to finish (in simple language) on color management and printing? I've read so many variations just on what color settings to use (I usually print from CS3) that I'm not even sure anymore what the best settings are for that.
I would be forever grateful! http://www.anchoredbygrace.com/smileys/mennoooohhhhhh.gif

[Codebreaker]

For the R1800 try this from the Epson web site.

http://tech.epson.com.au/downloads/message.asp?platform=&techtips=techtips&EmailAdd=&MetricIDReturned=1363756&submit=Search+%3E%3E&sCategory=Inkjet&id=stylusphotor1800

Unfortunately Colour Management has to deal with a vast range of different source images going to an equally vast range of destination devices.

Usually from camera to screen is pretty painless once you've Calibrated and Profiled your display since most cameras deliver just an sRGB image. However the myriad of printers all require there own unique handling and while some vendors support Colour Management others don't. Epson are particularly Photoshop friendly.

The basics are:-

1. Colours are represented by numbers.
2. Different devices use different numbers for the same colour
3. Different devices may not be capable of capturing, printing or displaying the same range of colours.
4. The colour number meanings are determined by a Profile.
5. To accurately take colours from one device and send them to another device, the Program doing this needs to be Colour Managed. Not all are, particularly many Windows programs. Photoshop is.
6. The Colour Management process translates the numbers from one device to the numbers needed by another device. To do this it uses the Profile of the source and the Profile of the destination - they are like colour language phrase books.
7. When the colour numbers go to a device that can't reproduce the colours, tricks can be played to convince us the colours are really there. This is the Rendering Intent..... Perceptual tricks us - Relative Colourimetric just clips the colours you can't get.
8. Only one process should do the Colour Management e.g Photoshop. If a Printer also tries to do Colour Management then the numbers get translated twice and may well come out wrong.
9. Screens and Prints may look different because of the different technologies - transmitted light from a screen v. reflected light from a print.
10. This means the colour fidelity of a print is very dependent on the light you use to view it.


Colin

[grammom]

Thanks, Codebreaker.
My camera shoots in sRGB. I've decided using the "North American General Purpose" in Color Settings would be best (even though some websites have suggested other settings.) Pretty much everyone states the same procedured for Soft Proofing and Print with Preview (although, again, I have read variations.)
I guess what was really starting to confuse me was the Color Assigning and Color Converting. If I'm correct though--I really don't need to assign a profile because CS3 is doing that and I don't need to convert because when I set up soft proofing, it does that. Do I have it right? I'm telling you, nobody has been completely the same as anyone else when it comes to all of these things.
I never knew getting a new printer would be so much work. I upgraded from an old HP2210. Of course, the prints didn't look as professional and rich as the prints from my R1800 do, but they looked like what I saw on my screen--not darker.
Thanks again for your help. :)

[Codebreaker]

The settings in both CS cover two aspects, as do those in Elements although there is less choice.

1. What to do when creating a brand new blank document
2. What to do when an image does not have a Colour Profile embedded or Tagged.
3. In the case of CS it also determines what happens when you paste images into an existing document.

For #1 the document gets the Colour Profile that you determine by the settings. For CS you have a wide choice. For Elements its either sRGB or AdobeRGB - often called Optimise or Screen or Print.

For #2, images that do have a Profile or are tagged with a Profile pass straight through, as it were, and the working space becomes that of the image. Hence an sRGB image gives an sRGB working space; AdobeRGB gives AdobeRGB working space; ProphotoRGB gives ProPhotoRGB workspace and so on.

For #2 images that do NOT have a Profile you can get a warning in CS (if the option is set) and then choose what to do. Elements can also do this in a limited way if you have version 4 and above and choose Allow Me to choose. Otherwise the document gets Assign sRGB or AdobeRGB depending on the Colour Settings again and this may well be wrong.

For #3 in CS if there is a mismatch between your current image working space and that which you are trying to paste in you'll get a warning and then you choose what to do.

As for Assigning and Converting then as you've established these are two different things.

Lets take an image that has no Profile embedded or tagged in it. In this case Photoshop has no idea what the colour space is - or in reality what colours the RGB values actually mean. In this case you Assign a Colour Space or Profile based upon what you believe it should be. So, if you know the image is AdobeRGB but hasn't got a Profile, you instruct Photoshop to Assign the AdobeRGB colour space. Now the numbers get assigned to the correct colours. If you told it the image was sRGB then the colours would be rendered incorrectly.

Converting is a different process and relies on the image having a Profile. In this case you want to convert from one Colour Space to another. For example you have an AdobeRGB image that you want to display on the Internet - which really needs sRGB. In this case the colour numbers get converted from those of AdobeRGB to those of sRGB. In other words most of the colours will still come out the same except that AdobeRGB has colours that sRGB can't support.

The display throws in another factor. It has it's own unique Profile or Colour Space and all images are Converted 'on the fly' to appear correctly rendered on the screen. The actual Colour Numbers in the image don't change.

What happens when you Soft Proof is that the image gets first Converted to the Colour Space of your destination, i.e your Printer, as determined by its Profile. Then it gets Converted back through the display Profile to appear on the screen. These again are done 'on the fly' so no actual image data is changed - the numbers stay the same in memory.

Hope this helps.

Colin

[grammom]

Thanks so much for trying to explain everything to this old lady, Colin. You have helped, but I know I still don't really understand it all.
I just noticed the link to your website. It looks like a very nice place to learn even more. I'm going to check it out. :)

[Codebreaker]

For most of us here the theory is not so much important compared with knowing what buttons to push and when. Typically we'll have simple setups - A camera, a PC, a Printer and it's possibile to work out the basics for what only we need.

Where the difficulty creeps in is when we have many possibilities to contend with. Images from many different source; large numbers of different displays; a bewildering array of printers. Colour Management has to cope with all possibilities.

So for our simple setups we should try and achieve the following:-

1. Calibrate and Profile your display using something like an Eye-One, Huey or Spyder. This means what you see on screen is the best it's going to get.
2. Turn on Colour Management in Photoshop - this means Photoshop will display the image as best it can.
3. Print with Photoshop managing the colours and using the specific profile for the printer/paper + turn off Colour Management in the Printer Driver.

1 and 2 are straightforward - #3 gets a bit tricky depending on the printer.

Having done this the thing to remember about printing is that it's unlikely all your printed images will look 100% like they do on screen - close but not 100%. Firstly it depends on viewing conditions - i.e the light used to view the print; secondly, printers have a different range of colours compared to your screen.

Once you've cracked the settings, write them down and stay with them. Most of all have fun doing it - its very rewarding.

Colin

[NickLewis]

Having done this the thing to remember about printing is that it's unlikely all your printed images will look 100% like they do on screen - close but not 100%. Firstly it depends on viewing conditions - i.e the light used to view the print;This is one issue that rarely seems to be made much of in these discussions.

Screen displays and prints are fundamentally different technologies. A CRT or LCD display is an emissive medium - it actually generates the light that our eyes use to perceive the image.

A print on the other hand is a reflective medium. The inks on the paper absorb certain colours of light and reflect others. We perceive the image from the reflected light reaching our eyes.

Ambient light conditions do affect our perception of a screen image, but it's a secondary effect, because the monitor is generating the needed light itself. (Our eye/brain combination makes a sort of "white balance correction" that we're not aware of, which can be significant particularly if the display doesn't fill your field of view.) But ambient light is the actual source of the light that we view a print with. It's central to the viewing process.

The ink and paper simply can't reflect back any colours that aren't in the ambient light itself, or even adjust for a different spectral distribution (i.e. temperature of light) from that intended. So it's always seemed to me that in calibrating a printer, it's not simply the ink/paper combination that is relevant, but the ink/paper/viewing light. Which, of course, isn't necessarily the light in the room you print the image in, or that your printer profiler uses.

Fortunately, I very rarely print, so I don't worry too much about it....:)

Nick