Once again: Color Management

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Hi good people,

In response to one of my student's questions I decided to set up my camera, PSE, monitor, and printer to conform to the best practices of color management. Before I take any non-reversible action I want to ask the group about returning my printer to the "standard" sRGB driver options if I want to.

My question is this: If I download and install the ICC color profiles for my Canon S9000 printer, can I uninstall them and return to the default profile?

What follows is a bit of background. Without any expanded color control I have been getting excellent prints from my S9000. The more I read about color management the more concerned I get of entering what Scott Kelby calls the "quicksand of color management." If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If I do use color management there seem to be a lot more steps I need to go through in order to get a print. And, many images will have to be converted before I can print them using Adobe RGB (1998). During the print driver dialog I must answer numerous questions. Now for that special print, I don't mind doing this, but the S9000 is my only printer and I want to keep printing fairly simple. In addition, my good wife does NOT want to make her printing any more complex than it already is!

In a perfect world I would like to keep the default color management system installed and "on." That is, no color management. When I go out to shoot that award winning shot, done in RAW with a lot of PSE "fussing," I want to turn on all of the color management support and turn out the best possible print. After that I would like to return my computer complex to standard "like it never even happened."

Is this possible?

Cheers,

Bob

[Codebreaker]

Hi Bob....

I'm not entirely sure of your question(s). A reasonable explanation of the colour management process can be found on my web-site under Colour Problems (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/colin_w/colour%20problems.htm)

But here's a few pointers that might answer your questions.



The printer profile will only be used with a colour managed program such as Elements, if you tell Elements to use it. In other words there really is no default profile as far as Elements is concerned. Elements remembers the last one you used.
The printer profile isn't used by the printer.
Converting images from sRGB to AdobeRGB adds no value and could cause problems. AdobeRGB has a wider colour space but your source space is smaller anyway, so the conversion isn't going to make colours you don't have already.
RAW images do not have a colour space. They only get a colour profile when you process them in ACR or whatever. In Elements this will be sRGB if you have the colour settings set to Optimise for Screen, or AdobeRGB if set to Optimise for Print.
sRGB has been chosen as a basic colour space that most monitors will equate to. Printers on the other hand have colour spaces all over the place but generally if you let them manage the colours then they are happy with an sRGB image. Some printers allow you to control this; others don't.


In summary:-



I'd always advise having Colour Management turned on in Elements; choose either Optimise for Screen or Print but never NO.
Let Elements manage the colours when printing and turn off the colour management in the printer driver.
If you really want a simple life then you could try for an sRGB workflow and have No Colour Management and just set the printer for the correct paper type and quality.

Colin

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Hi Colin,

Let me break this down into two problems. 1/ What is MY problem? 2/ What is my STUDENT'S problem?

1/ This problem is easy: If I download the Canon S9000 ICC profile and install it on my computer can I uninstall it at a later date? Thus, can I ever go "home" again?

2/ I don't have a problem, but two of my students do. Interestingly enough, they both have Epson printers. One has model 1400 and I have no record of the other student's model number. Their problem is the same: The color in the preview in the camera pretty much matches the color in PSE 7.0 on their monitors. One of the students has tuned his monitor with a colorimeter. BUT... the color coming out of the printer is way off.

I advised them to follow the Scott Kelby recipe found in his book: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers starting on page 457. This is where I got the suggestion about using Adobe RGB (1998). That was on page 460. This seems to differ from your suggestion:

"3. Converting images from sRGB to AdobeRGB adds no value and could cause problems. AdobeRGB has a wider colour space but your source space is smaller anyway, so the conversion isn't going to make colours you don't have already." I took Scott's idea and told them to set their cameras to Adobe RGB (1998) so the camera and PSE are talking "Adobe."

Anyway, I am about to study your very excellent information on Colour Problems. I will stay with this issue until both students are getting reasonably good color prints.

Thank you for your help with this problem,

Bob

[Codebreaker]

1/ This problem is easy: If I download the Canon S9000 ICC profile and install it on my computer can I uninstall it at a later date? Thus, can I ever go "home" again?It doesn't matter. You can have as many profiles on your PC as you want. They only get used by Elements when you tell Elements to do so - and that's during printing when you select the Printer Profile. That is if you have Elements managing the colours during printing.

2/ I don't have a problem, but two of my students do. Interestingly enough, they both have Epson printers. One has model 1400 and I have no record of the other student's model number. Their problem is the same: The color in the preview in the camera pretty much matches the color in PSE 7.0 on their monitors. One of the students has tuned his monitor with a colorimeter. BUT... the color coming out of the printer is way off.The LCD screens on cameras are not an accurate guide of how the colours look. They tend not to be calibrated and often have user controls that allow you to adjust the brightness to some arbitrary value that suits the user.

If the PC monitor is 'tuned' with a Colourimeter AND Elements has Colour Management turned on AND the image contains a Profile (camera images usually do) then what you see on the screen is as accurate as your going to get with that display.

Printing has its own set of rules to follow but be aware that even when followed some difference may occur:-


Print colours are dependent on the light used to view them....its reflected light that you see. This is different from a monitor which transmits the light
The colour range or gamut of printers and papers varies and may not be as wide in some regions as the camera or screen.

The basics for printing are:-


Start by using the printer manufacturers best quality photo paper and ink
Set Elements to manage the colours during printing
Set Elements to use the paper profile for the printer and paper being used
Set the Rendering Intent to Relative Colourimetric
Turn off Colour Management in the Printer Driver
Set the Printer Driver to use the correct paper type and quality


I advised them to follow the Scott Kelby recipe found in his book: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers starting on page 457. This is where I got the suggestion about using Adobe RGB (1998). That was on page 460. This seems to differ from your suggestion: Its a reasonable starting point but if the camera captures AdobeRGB then unless you have a screen that can also display the range of AdobeRGB then colours will get clipped. (This type of display is expensive and not typical of those bought by home users). How will you know? - well only by comparing an sRGB screen with an AdobeRGB screen.

If you go on to print an AdobeRGB camera image from Elements to a printer that can render some of the colours in the AdobeRGB space and your screen is only sRGB capable, then colour differences may occur - dependent on image content.

Note: You don't print what's on the screen but what's in the computers memory. There may be 2 pints in the memory but you can only see 1 pint on the screen but still manage to print out 1 1/2 pints :)

"3. Converting images from sRGB to AdobeRGB adds no value and could cause problems. AdobeRGB has a wider colour space but your source space is smaller anyway, so the conversion isn't going to make colours you don't have already." I took Scott's idea and told them to set their cameras to Adobe RGB (1998) so the camera and PSE are talking "Adobe."Again it's not a bad generalisation in my opinion. You can never tell if the user has all the right equipment to be able to view and print all the colours in the AdobeRGB range. However, it can give rise to problems if part of the workflow is not Colour Managed correctly.

Note: Adobe Elements is only the program handling the colour management and it will cope with whatever colour space you throw at it - providing it has colour management turned on. It has no preference for any space when sending an image which contains a profile. It will have a preference for images without profiles and this can cause problems.

AdobeRGB images look very flat if posted on the web and view with a browser that's not colour managed - e.g IE7. On the other hand an sRGB image will look pretty much ok.

Some printer manufacturers quote an AdobeRGB colour space but are a little economical with the truth. Yes it can render some of the colours outside the range of sRGB but often not all of those in the AdobeRGB space.

Some printers are difficult to control - disabling colour management - and some you can't get paper profiles for; unless you do them yourself. In this instance I've found that and sRGB workflow works pretty well.


Wow!!!!!!

In summary then....

Colour ranges will differ from camera > screen > printer. To accomodate these different ranges you need a Colour Managed workflow. In other words a program that makes use of screen and printer profiles.

The most common colour space of displays is sRGB and a good many printers are happy if they are given and sRGB image to process themselves. In this case a Non Colour Managed workflow can often work quite well.

Come back with anything else you need to know or are not clear of.

Colin

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Hi Colin,

Once again, I have learned that if you want to know something about PSE, or photography in general, Elements Village is the be all and end all. Your website is a gold mine of information about color management. Thank you. I will post my student's progress and my own experiments in color management here next week.

Cheers,

Bob

[WendellY]

Interesting discussion; partly due to my newness in digital photography and partly due to my computing background, I have tried to keep things very simple in my color-managed workflow.

First of all, I shoot in RAW format; this allows me flexibility in choosing which lossless format to store my converted pictures - for the most part either TIFF or PSD - and I have also chosen to attach a wide gamut profile - AdobeRGB - to each converted 16-bit image.

These decisions have several implications (and compromises) for my workflow:

1) By choosing a wide-gamut image profile, I have optimized my workflow for printing. Modern inkjet printers have relatively wide native gamuts that are a good match for AdobeRGB (most native printer spaces are wider that sRGB) and so my prints tend to have really accurate and vibrant color.

2) I have compromised viewing accuracy, as a monitor that has AdobeRGB is too expensive for my occasional photo editing use, and so I am fine when colors are clipped when viewing AdobeRGB-tagged images on my calibrated monitor.

3) For viewing and posting to websites, I convert to 8-bit and attach an sRGB profile. Simple.

4) For printing, I sharpen and then print PSD using QIMAGE. This way I don't have to figure out any printing specifics associated with Elements and let QIMAGE print away in the background. QIMAGE has some excellent interpolation algorithms that can rescue marginal, low density images.

[Not4wood]

Interesting read indeed. Of all the information that has been posted including the ICC Printer Profile the only thing I do see that was left out was the ICC Paper Profile downloaded from the Paper Manufacturer for the specific printer being used.

If your using an Epson or HP printer and you are using one of there own papers then it doesn't make a differance because the printer drivers already have that ICC Profile already built in. But, and I say this because with all of the very high quality I've seen being pushed out in these wonderful Village Artists I see many other papers besides HP and Epson being used. These paper profiles are what I'm speaking of to get the maximum benefit of the image printed on these higher quality papers.

[Codebreaker]

If you're still running WinXP there's an excellent little applet from Microsoft called something like MS Color Applet. It gives you a graphical representation of Colour Spaces and you can compare two different spaces.

It's quite interesting to run because it shows that some printers that claim to have an AdobeRGB colour space in fact only have a partial coverage of some of the colours outside of sRGB - not the full AdobeRGB.

For paper profiles its always worth checking the manufacturers web site for updates. My Epson R2400 did indeed include paper profiles but there was a later update of the profiles only.

While all of the technicalities are interesting - well to me at least - for most of us it's the end result that counts and sometimes we should stop worrying about what the best technical solution is and just get on with admiring the end result and not judging what's wrong with it.

Glass half empty or full - or maybe just not big enough :)


Colin

[Chris Emery]

Bob & Codebreaker,

Thanks so much for your advice... photo printers should come with a warning sticker, "may be hazardous to your geek status".

I have compromised and gotten as close as I think I can with out getting a degree in printer/monitor technology. I guess the real answer is unless you going to become a professional it trial and error.

I did have one question. During my discussions with Spyder3 folks they suggested Soft Proofing before printing. I don’t see this option in Elements-7. Do you know where I could find some more info on this and is it a valid option for improving prints?

Bob – see you Thursday……….. Codebreaker – Thanks again..!!

[RobertSchuldenfrei]

Hi Chris,

Glad to see you made it here! You will really enjoy the likes of Colin and all of the other "villagers" who are really deep into the technical swamp we call Photoshop Elements.

Cheers,

Bob

[Chris Emery]

During my discussions with Spyder3 folks they suggested Soft Proofing before printing. I don’t see this option in Elements-7. Do you know where I could find some more info on this and is it a valid option for improving prints?

[Codebreaker]

Chris.....

Soft proofing isn't a feature of Elements. You can do this in full Photoshop and I think I did see a third party plug-in for Elements that might have done this. Can't remember where though!

Colin

[Codebreaker]

Chris.....

Just another consideration for you. Viewing conditions of prints are very important. This is because prints work with relected light whereas your screen transmits light. The colour of the light you use to view your< prints will effect the colours you see bounced back.

I use a Daylight 65K bulb for viewing my prints (its also the temperature I set my screen to) and if I'm happy with what I see under that then that's fine for me. If they look different elsewhere so be it.

Also keep in mind that the two (print v screen ) may never match 100% so a compromise is often necessary.

Colin

[Michel B]

Chris.....

Soft proofing isn't a feature of Elements. You can do this in full Photoshop and I think I did see a third party plug-in for Elements that might have done this. Can't remember where though!

Colin

Probably in the Elements + package:
http://simplephotoshop.com/elementsplus/en_US/soft_proof.htm