(Chapter Five of The Digital Fine Print by Jeremy Daalder)

In this chapter, we start to put it all together and move towards achieving an entirely colour managed workflow, by looking at device profiles and how to get them. We discuss the movement of one single, solitary colour managed pixel from input, through visualisation, to output.

It is this high level of control over what we're putting on paper that will let us achieve truly beautiful prints!

Contents of this section:

• A Quick Review
• Making it Work in Practice
• Real World Device Gamuts
• Quick Notes on The Wacky World of Device Profiles
• The Journey of a Single Colour Managed Pixel
• Visualising What We're Doing
• LAB - The Profile Connection Space
• Why Don't We Always Use Lab Then? (Re-visited)
• The Working Space
• Ignore LAB!
• The End Of The Journey
• One More Thing!
• Obtaining / Making Device Profiles
• Input Profiles (Scanner and Camera Profiles)
• Monitor Profiles
• Output Profiles (AKA Printer Profiles)
• Obtaining Custom Output Profiles For Your Own Printer
• Getting Output Profiles From Your Lab
• Making Output Profiles Of Your Lab (if they don't have them available)
• The Truly Clueless Lab
• In the next episode...

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First a Quick Review

In the last chapter we went through the basic theories of managing colour in a digital imaging workflow.

We discussed what we want, versus what we normally get – and discussed why this problem occurs.  It’s all about the numbers in the digital files (as discussed in the second installment) and the fact that they lack any real meaning if the files are untagged – each device will just reproduce those numbers as they see fit, and because each device is using different colorants to produce its colour, the colours all come out differently on different devices.

So we then introduced the concept of colour spaces – dictionaries for colour that translate from the numbers in a file into absolute real colours – (where absolute colours are specific colours under a specific light source - and all have value in the LAB colour space which defines the gamut of the human eye).

So, at this stage we know that all pixels are just RGB number triplets like (128,128,128). And we know that colour spaces give real meaning to those numbers (i.e. define a translation between the numbers and absolute LAB values). 

We also know that there are two types of colour spaces – those that are device dependent (based on measuring the physical properties of a device) and those that are deliberately device independent (theoretical colour spaces that abstract colour away from individual devices).  We use the device independent colour spaces specifically because we don’t want our colours to depend on the mood of our inkjet on a particular day – we want to talk about what colours we want in absolute terms, and then get those colours out of our devices.

We went into some detail of the anatomy of a colour space – that each colour space has 3 defining characteristics – namely the colorants (primaries) used to mix all the other colours, the black/white points, and the tone characteristic curves.  When graphed, they look like this:

We considered colour spaces as boundaries for colour – they define what all the numbers from 0 to 255 mean for each colour, and there is no -1 and 256.  So by defining the end points we are define the maximum achievable gamut in that colour space.  If we’re talking about a device profile – that is measured – i.e. we measure the most saturated colours, the darkest black, the brightest white, and all the colours in-between to come up with the profile.   In an abstract colour space, we choose what the end points are.  We’ll get into more detail about this today, and really convert all this theory into working practice. 

Making it work in practice

This chapter is all about making colour management work in practice.  Even if all the theory makes your head spin and you can’t quite get your head around it, the actual USE of colour management in practice. is actually pretty simple.  You’ll probably find the theory becomes more understandable as you consider how it works in practice., and we’ll go over several examples to make sure it all makes sense.

A quick look at some real world device gamuts.

It’s worth looking briefly at some real world measurements now, to give you a stronger idea of what we’re talking about. 

The image below is a plot (seen from above, looking down on the whitepoint) of the gamuts of a high quality Eizo LCD monitor (the wire-frame graph) versus the measured gamut of an Epson 7800 inkjet printer using Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper.

You can see how the monitor’s gamut extend much deeper into the red, greens and blues than the printers – not surprising because a monitor is inherently an RGB based device (its colorants are red, green and blue).  The printer’s gamut extends more heavily into the cyans, magentas, and yellows – again not that surprising since the colorants of the device are CMY. 

The graph shows clearly one of the fundamental problems of colour management – what we can see on our screens is vastly different to what we can print.  There’s a whole range of saturated yellows our printer can achieve that we can’t see on screen, and vast numbers of blues, greens and reds that we can see on our screen that we can’t print.

Notice that these plots only really show you gamut volume – i.e. These plots only really show you the edges of the gamut, the most saturated colours that exist for the profile.  These plots don’t really tell you anything about what is going on inside of a profile.
Here’s a plot of the gamut of a modern digital camera (Canon EOS 1DS MK2) versus the Epson 7800 – as you can see the gamut of the camera far exceeds what is printable on paper.

These images are really here just to remind you that all this theory has a very practical context – colour spaces are used to clearly define the range of colours a device can produce. 

Quick notes on the wacky world of device profiles

A device profile is like a map of a device’s behaviour across its entire gamut.  Your ability to take advantage of that gamut is totally determined by the accuracy of that map.  But the map reflects the true behaviour of the device as measured, and it may not be a pretty thing.  It certainly isn’t a great place, in general, to work with colour.  The device profile may well reflect all sorts of things you don’t expect – one very obvious and common issue is that devices rarely have linear, neutral grey scales.  That is, if you’re working in the device’s colour space, you can’t rely on all equal value RGB triplets (10,10,10 and 20,20,20 etc) being a neutral grey, like you can in a well behaved working space.  Device profiles also reflect the actual gamma of that device, which may differ considerably from the standard 2.2 used to reflect the gamma of a print (i.e. tone curve from shadow to highlight).  So working within a device profile may mean you get unexpected results with both colour and density.

We’ll talk more about this when we talk about Early Binding Vs Late Binding – the key point to take on board is that device profiles reflect the real world chemistry of inks, or the real world physics of phosphors, so they’re not necessarily nice, neat things, and they don’t always behave like we might logically expect.
Putting it all together

In practice., colour management works like this:

RGB values are created by a camera or scanner.  These colours are converted by the scanner profile into the closest matching colours available in our working space.  Then, just before we send these colour numbers to the printer, the printer profile translates those numbers into the best matching colours the printer can produce.

To break that down, we’re going to look at how it all works, from capture to output, for just one single pixel in a file.

The Journey of a Single Colour Managed Pixel

The easiest way to really work out what is going on is to imagine the life of a single pixel all the way from capture to output – that is, how is the colour on just one pixel managed (kept consistent) all the way from initial capture all the way to final output. 

If we can manage the colour of one pixel all the way through the chain, then all we have to do is follow exactly the same formula for all the pixels in our file and we’ll have successfully managed colour from capture to output.

Doing it backwards

We’re going to start at the print and work our way back to the original colour in the original scene.  This is because its always easier to work towards something if you know exactly what it is you are working towards – this is true whether we’re talking more generally about pre-visualisation of your final image, or just the specifics of the colour of one tiny dot on a page.

Here’s our goal – we want to produce the absolute colour as defined in LAB as (20,-15,25) – a leafy green colour.  We want to produce a single dot of this absolute colour on a nice piece of fibre based Hahnemuehle Photo Rag paper – that is, we want to lay down some mixture of ink, that when viewed under a standardised light source (D50), appears as that absolute colour. 

So how do we get there?  How do we get the printer to produce this colour?

Well, first we have to know if the colour is in our printer’s gamut at all – that is, is there anyway to tell the printer to produce this colour at all?  If the colour is not achievable on the printer at all, then we’ve failed – the best thing we can do is lay down the closest thing to this colour, and hope it is close enough to be convincing.  If the colour IS in the printer’s gamut, then we just want to send the printer the right numbers to get it to produce this colour.

It’s the printer profile that tells us whether or not a particular colour is in a printer’s gamut  (remember the printer’s profile is a device dependent colour space created by measuring the printer’s total gamut).  The printer profile tells us what RGB values we need to send to the printer to get the printer to actually print that colour.  In this case, the printer profile tells us that to get this particular shade of leafy green on to paper, we have to send the printer the following numbers:

RGB (71,100,14) – the colour numbers the printer needs to receive to produce leafy green
(aka LAB(20,-15,25))

So, to achieve this colour on the printer, we have to send the printer a single RGB pixel with those numbers. 

We’ve just taken one step back from our goal, and worked out how to achieve that goal. 

How do we get to RGB(71,100,14)?

We have to send our printer RGB (71,100,14) to achieve the leafy green that we want, but how do we get to this number? 

Well, we’re photographers and we create images by capturing light with a sensor.  Whether that sensor is a digital camera or film, it doesn’t really matter.  Either way, the sensor in question generates RGB colour numbers to represent the colours of the real world.  Problem is, all the sensors generate different colour numbers.  Could we just tell our camera to always record colours as our printer sees those colours?  Well, we could, but we’d be forever tied to that particular printer – and we know that printers can’t reproduce a lot of colours of the real world.  We really want to take full advantage of the complete abilities of our camera (which are already pretty feeble) and not limit our camera’s ability to record the world based on our printer.  Especially since there is almost certainly a printer in the near future that will be able to produce a wider gamut.

Hopefully you can see we need an independent step in the middle.  That is, take the best possible colour we can record at the input end, and translate that into the best possible colour we can achieve at the output end.

In this case, imagine we are taking a photograph of a plant.  This plant, when we shoot it, contains the same leafy green we want to reproduce – the absolute colour LAB(20,-15,25).  We’ll shoot this image on film and scan it, to keep things simple for now.

We know the scanner produces RGB values, not LAB values.  In this case, the scanner produces the values of (30,70,25) for the same shade of green.  If we sent this directly to the printer, we wouldn’t get the same green – we’d get the printer’s version of (30,70,25) which is a completely different green.  So we have to translate from the scanner’s green, to the printer’s green.  Which is pretty easy – we just convert (30,70,25) from the scanner into the printer’s equivalent green (71,100,14) and we’re done.

In reality, it is Photoshop that sits in the middle and does these conversions.  To do these conversions, it looks at the RGB <-> LAB tables in each profile, and it basically works like this:

• Scanner (30,70,25) = LAB(20,-15,25)
• LAB(20,-15,25) = Printer (71,100,14)

So you can see how profiles are being used to translate between different device dependent RGB values by converting those numbers into universal, absolute colours in LAB. 

A printer profile is really just a big table of these match-ups – to print such and such a LAB colour, the printer requires such and such RGB.

The scanner profile is just the same – a big table that says, for each colour, when the scanner generates such and such RGB, it really means such and such LAB.

So we go from RGB -> LAB -> RGB.

This works, and if you have complete tables representing the gamuts of the scanner and the printer, it is sufficient if all we want to do is send files directly from the scanner to the printer – the colours will be consistent across these devices and the job of colour management is done.

But generally we want to do more with our files – we want to see them on screen, we want to retouch them, and we want to take them from simple captures, into wonderful expressive prints.  And for this we need at least one more device – our screen.

Visualising what we’re doing

We’ve just discussed the life of a single pixel from capture by scanner through to final print on fibre based paper.  And we’ve succeeded in translating colour between devices by using profiles (our colour dictionaries).  This is a great leap forward, but not yet nearly enough.  All this isn’t much good to us if we can’t see and edit our files.

So far, we have three different values for the colour we want to achieve –

• The absolute colour LAB(20,-15,25)
• The RGB colour our scanner generates for this absolute colour – RGB (30,70,25)
• The RGB colour our printer needs to be given to print this colour – RGB (71,100,14)

Your monitor is also an RGB device, and it too has its own colour response.  So it too needs to be sent an RGB colour that causes it to display its best match for the same absolute LAB colour.  In this case it is your monitor’s profile that supplies the RGB values that best match the LAB colour we want to achieve, and the results is:

RGB (49, 24, 5)

So, for just this one pixel, we have a pretty complicated situation, which looks like this:

 

The result of all this?

One single pixel of a leafy green colour that is consistent from capture, through visualisation, to print.  Multiply by several million and you have yourself a fully colour managed workflow!  At this point we can capture the colour, see the colour on our screens, and print the colour.  But what if we want to actually edit that colour?

Fine printing is very much about managing tonal relationships between pixels in your files – and for that we need Photoshop.

LAB – the Profile Connection Space

From all this, we can see LAB is pretty important.  It sits in the middle of all the devices and acts as the universal language that translates from RGB numbers into consistent, absolute colours.  Photoshop actually does all of its maths in LAB.  As PS converts colours from one device to another, it uses the tables in profiles to convert LAB values to RGB.  This is why LAB is called the Profile Connection Space.

Why Don’t We Always use LAB then?

If we have a universal language that defines all the colours the human eye can see, why don’t we just make all our devices use LAB directly, and why don’t we just work on our files in Photoshop in LAB mode rather than RGB mode in Photoshop?

It is in fact quite possible to work in LAB, and many people regularly do, for a variety of reasons.  However for general purpose usage, LAB isn’t a great place to be because it makes colour harder to understand than the RGB model. 

Using RGB (and the digital colour wheel) is conceptually simple – by isolating the colours and clearly identifying the primaries and their opposites – this is much easier than trying to manipulate colours in the language of A and B.  Also, RGB working colour spaces generally have a neutral axis – that is from 0,0,0 through 128,128,128 to 256,256 we have from black, through shades of neutral grey, to white.  So RGB (the language of light) is a very convenient and conceptually simple place in which to work.

LAB isn’t so friendly and obvious.  You can try it for yourself – convert one of your files into LAB and attempt to edit the colours.  You will find strange things happen.  It’s not really important why this is the case, just that it IS the case.

So working in LAB is no good to us.

The Working Space

Instead of working directly in LAB, which doesn’t make much conceptual sense, we (generally) choose to work in RGB, because RGB is the language of light, the language of the human eye, and the language of most of our devices, so it’s the easiest one to understand and use.

This means we need yet another translation to occur, from the LAB colours in the middle of all this, to the working RGB space.  We’ll use a popular working space called AdobeRGB as an example, and later on we’ll discuss popular working spaces in general.

In this example, the AdobeRGB values for our leafy green are (44,56,18)

From Scanner to working space it goes like this:

• The scanner colour (30, 70 , 25) is generated by the scanner when it sees the absolute colour LAB(20,-15,25)
• LAB(20,-15,25) is converted to the equivalent working space colour  AdobeRGB(44,56,18)

From working space to screen it goes like this:

• AdobeRGB(44,56,18) is converted to LAB(20,-15,25)
• LAB(20,-15,25) is converted to the monitor’s RGB (49,24,45)

From working space to printer it goes like this:

• AdobeRGB(44,56,18) is converted to LAB(20,-15,25)
• LAB(20,-15,25) is converted to the printer’s RGB (71,100,14)

…and thus all the devices, finally, are producing the same colour because profiles are converting the actual absolute colour to the RGB numbers that correspond to that actual colour, and we’ve also got our file into an easy to understand abstract working space for editing.

Ignore LAB!

While LAB is the colour model used in the background, and it is very useful to understand what it is, for the most part, you can ignore it.  You’ll probably only ever work with RGB files and think in RGB values for a good long while until your understanding of this deepens over time. 

In the end, in practice, colour management looks like this:

The end of the journey

Using accurate device profiles, we have translated the colours between devices and abstract working spaces, all the while keeping the colour consistent – even though all our devices use different numbers to represent the same colours, we get the same colour on each device – which is what colour management is all about.

So there are two major components to a colour managed workflow –

• The device profiles that accurately describe the behaviour and gamut of devices
• The abstract working spaces we use while in Photoshop.

Good colour management is all about getting/making good device profiles and making informed decisions about working spaces.  So that is what we’ll talk about next.

One More Thing!

The above example shows us what happens when everything works nicely – but of course in practice. there are always some glitches in the system.  Not only are there glitches in the system, but there are some inherent limits in the system – and we’ve already seen one major reason why (the gamuts of devices do not match up nearly as much as we might like).

The first thing to achieve is to get colour management working perfectly in simple situations – like reproducing one, in gamut, colour that all the devices in the chain can comfortably deal with.  Once we’ve achieved that, we can look at solving the problems when we inevitably run into them.  And in reality, even with the flaws in the system, very good results are easily achievable.

Obtaining / Making Device Profiles

To manage colour on our colour devices, we need accurate device profiles. There are three main categories for devices, and thus three different ways of obtaining accurate profiles.

Input Profiles (Scanner and Camera Profiles)

The first step in any colour managed work flow is always capture.

Perhaps surprisingly, input profiles are perhaps the least successful and most difficult part of colour management.  Fundamentally, this is because scanners and cameras just don’t have fixed gamuts.  That is, with a screen or a printer, there are finite bounds on the colours these machines can produce.  On a screen, the most saturated blue I can get out of it is the most saturated blue, there’s simply no way of getting a more saturated blue from the screen and so, as far as the screen is concerned, no more saturated blue exists.

Cameras and scanners, on the other hand, are looking at existing colours and converting them into RGB numbers.  The thing is, no matter what you put in front of them, they always see something – even if they’re not really capable of an intelligent and accurate response to that particular colour.  And what they see varies pretty dramatically depending on the brightness of what they are seeing, and light temperature of what they are seeing.  Thus defining the colour response of a scanner or a camera is particularly difficult.

Scanner Profiles
Scanners can be successfully profiled because their light source is fixed – so their response to colour is predictable.  However, there are many pitfalls as film varies so much, and no scanner profile is ever completely successful for all types of film.  Generally, it is easy to make a good profile for positive films, but black and white and particularly colour negatives are very tricky. 

Scanners typically come with profiles and usually these are tolerably good, so they are a good starting point.  Just make sure the scanning software is actually using the profile, as very often, out of the box, the scanning software is not set up to actually use the supplied profiles!

If you want to get a custom colour profile for a scanner (usually the best option), call me at Image Science on (03) 9348 9808 – we can make one for you.  But be aware it won’t solve ALL of your problems, particularly if you mainly shoot negative film. 

Your best option, though, is probably leave scanning to the experts (like us).  Good scanning is an art form in itself and good scanning machines cost tens of thousands of dollars.  What you don’t want to do is spend time and money producing a beautiful image on film only to scan it with a toy scanner like a flatbed.  Good scanners are better in all sorts of ways – sharper, better shadow penetration and perhaps most importantly, much better tonal separation.  This results in images that are far more accurate and three dimensional, and in the end the money is well spent.

Camera Profiles
Camera profiles are almost impossible to make – that is, it is impossible to make one single profile that is successful for all shooting situations.

Camera profiles for specific situations can be made – but they are really only accurate for that specific situation.  If, for example, you are working under very specific conditions in a studio, using digital lights with consistent colour output, a very accurate profile can be made.  But if you’re shooting outdoors under a variety of lighting conditions, then a profile won’t really help you because it just won’t be accurate for all conditions.

So camera profiles are tricky?  What to do?
As it turns out, camera profiles are not fantastically important.  Generally, especially if you are using high quality devices, the colours they produce will be fairly accurate.  To increase the accuracy, you can use some basic tricks – especially for getting accurate white balance on a digital camera (the old grey card proves handy yet again!).

Secondly, your raw conversion software does some tricky stuff with its own internal profiles for your camera.  And given you’ve calibrated your screen, you should be easily able to make adjustments to your files as you convert them from raw, such that you produce an accurate file – they key thing is that you can accurately see what you are doing (i.e. have a calibrated monitor).  If you are working on a screen which is not calibrated, you are risking making some pretty fundamental mistakes – it is easily possible that you will be processing ALL your files such that they are too warm, or too magenta, or whatever.  If you are shooting with a digital camera you MUST calibrate your screen because, unlike in the past with film, you are completely responsible for setting the final colour balance.

Visualisation Device Profiles (Monitor Profiles)

We covered this in the first lecture so won’t repeat too much here. Suffice it to say, regular machine based calibration with a high quality calibration unit, is absolutely essential. 

An accurate screen and a nice, neutral working environment are absolutely key in achieving high quality results with colour.

Output Profiles (aka Printer Profiles)

Output profiles describe the behaviour of an output device and can be used to soft-proof (i.e. simulate on your monitor) the actual output that you will get from that particular device when you send your file to it.  This can save you time and a lot of money – you can see printing problems even before you make a print!

Whether you print for yourself or you have a lab do your printing, good output profiles will make a HUGE difference to the quality of your work. 

Good output profiles are HIGHLY specific – they describe the behaviour of a specific printer with a specific media (when the final print is viewed under a specific reference light source, i.e. D50). 

If you change your printer (obviously), or the brand of inks, or the type of paper you are using, you will need a new profile.  NB, for inks, this means the brand of inks, you do not need a new profile every time you put in a new set of cartridges!  If you are printing for a specific light source that is significantly different to D50 (e.g. an exhibition in a gallery using flouros), you will need a different profile.  The more accurate your output profiles, the better the results you will be able to achieve.

There are three ways to get output profiles for your printer.

1. Make them yourself using several thousand dollars worth of equipment and software – which is great and very flexible, but very expensive.  Not generally worth it unless you are using a LOT of different media types.
   
   
2. Probably the best option in general – have a profile building service make a custom output profile for you (about $75 to $600 depending on what you get and who makes it for you – Image Science changes just $75 for profiles made using the best equipment and techniques available today)
   
   
3. Download a canned profile from the internet.

If Option 1 appeals to you, then Image Science can help you select the appropriate equipment.  It’s very expensive (minimum about $2500 but for a really good setup you are looking at more like $7500).  

Option 3 is in general not really good enough for high quality printing – canned profiles from the internet are invariably of fairly poor quality and do not take into account the specific behaviour of your printer.  They’re usually good enough to get a rough idea of whether you like a paper or not,  but that is about it. 

Custom Output Profiles are relatively cheap, extremely accurate, and the best way to go.

Getting Custom Output Profiles For Your Printer

There are a few custom profiling services around.  Most aren’t that good and most are very expensive.  Beware the profile services offered by photographic equipment stores, or the free profiles that come from paper suppliers.  In general, these profiles are made to satisfy the goal of successfully selling you the product and reducing customer complaints after the sale.  They are not made to achieve the best possible results from your printer.

Output profiles are produced by getting your printer to print a vast range of colour patches and reading those patches in with a spectrophotometer.  The profile making software then uses this information to produce a complete gamut map of your printer’s behaviour across its entire tonal range.  The process is very precise, and so precise instructions must be followed when producing the colour patches (known as targets) on your printer.

For full instructions, see the Custom Printer Profiling section of the website.

Getting Output Profiles From Your Lab

Profiling chemistry based printers is trickier because their colour output varies so dramatically as their chemistry changes throughout the day.  Temperature, humidity and how many prints have gone through the chemistry can have a very big effect on the final output.

Fortunately, most modern machines are very clever at keeping themselves consistent.  Firstly, they are self diagnostic and prompt the operators to replenish chemistry etc as required.  They also typically offer self calibration features that get them back to a known state – it is this known state that is profiled, and as long as the printer runs to this known state, or near it, at all times, the profile is accurate.  Of course, this comes down to day to day operating practice, and only real experience with a lab will tell you how well they are running their machines.

I’m aware of only a handful of labs in this country that can supply truly accurate ICC profiles for their printing services.  The best of these, (in my opinion), for general photographic output is a Sydney lab called Pixel Perfect (www.pixelperfect.com.au). These guys once told me they re-calibrate their machine to their profile every two hours!  Most other labs are lucky if they do this once a week (if ever!).

Image Science of course also runs a fully profiled Fine Art printing service (download the profiles by visiting our Downloads area).  If you’re interested in getting some truly beautiful prints made on archival, cotton rag papers, have a look at our printing services.

Some other labs claim to offer ICC profiles, but typically they are not really accurate as they are based on default behaviour rather than actual measurements of their own machines (the profiles just came in the box of paper, or whatever).  Generally you can get a sense of how savvy a lab is about colour management by inspecting their marketing material and talking to their staff.  Unless they clearly know what they are talking about, I suggest you try another lab.  Ask them how often the re-calibrate their machine to their profile – remember Pixel Perfect do so every two hours!  Most labs don’t even know what this means!

If any lab wants you to use the Shirley system (where they give you a print so that you can twiddle your monitor's controls to match by eye, then run (don’t walk!) in the other direction.

The only way this situation will change is if you regularly request accurate ICC profiles from the lab your work with – eventually, with enough people asking, they will get the message.  Ask them why, in this day and age, when colour management is relatively simple and cheap, they are not doing this already!

Making Output Profiles For Your Lab

Just because the lab you use is behind the times, it doesn’t mean you can’t work around them!  There is nothing to stop you from profiling the lab you work with.  The process is much the same as when you profile your own printer, except you have the lab print the targets out instead.  See the Custom Printer Profiling section of www.imagescience.com.au for full instructions.

The caveat, of course, is that the profile is only valid if they actually run their machine in a way that the profile indicates (ie keep it running in some sort of consistent state).   And only experience will tell you if that is the case.

The Truly Clueless Lab

A special mention must go to what must be the most clueless lab in the country that I’m aware of. 

Instead of producing accurate output profiles for their printers, they have created an abstract theoretical colour space about half the size of sRGB which they then send directly to all their printers.  This is specifically because they are a quantity driven, not quality driven lab, and it seems they specifically target the unskilled market.

Their profile deliberately prevents you from printing any colours that are vaguely saturated (eg. green grass on a summer’s afternoon!).  This seems to be to specifically to reduce the potential for client complaints – but makes this lab next to useless for anyone but the most basic portrait photographers.

Just crazy!  But indicative of what some labs will do to your colour - if you let them. 

In The Next Episode….

You’ve now seen how it all works, and hopefully you now realise that there are a few things you really need to make colour management, and by extension Fine Printing, an achievable goal. 

So - to re-emphasise - To make beautiful prints, you simply must:

• Calibrate your monitor with a hardware calibrator
• Obtain and use accurate output profiles for your output device (or lab)

It is these two steps that will give you accurate, precise control over the printing process. It is this level of control that will help you achieve beautiful prints.

So make sure, before the next chapter, you’ve sorted all that out, so that you can put things into practice.

Next we’re going to set Photoshop up properly, plug all of your new profiles into the right places, follow an example from capture to output, discuss RGB working spaces, and then address the remaining problems with the whole approach.