Simple Color Management

22 Apr Leave a Comment Filed Under: Aperture, Lightroom, Photography, Printing

You can make pho­to­graphic color man­age­ment com­pli­cated if you must. But you can get far more than 80% of the way to per­fect with a min­imum of effort and time. Here’s what I do in order to ensure that my images print (Epson 3880) as I see them on my dis­play (Apple 23″ LCD Cinema Display).

The key to a proper pho­to­graphic color man­aged work­flow is the use of pro­files. Each pro­file “trans­lates” the inter­pre­ta­tion of color for one device into the inter­pre­ta­tion of color on another device. For example, a cer­tain red on your dis­play needs to map to the cor­rect red on your printer — but the dis­play and the printer “speak” dif­ferent color “lan­guages.” The pro­file “translates.”

Don’t Sweat the Camera Profile

Whichever RAW con­verter you use (you do shoot in RAW format, don’t you?) has color pro­files for all of the cam­eras it sup­ports. The pro­files that are part of Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) and Aperture are all very good. I don’t have any expe­ri­ence with other RAW con­verters, but I would assume they’re fine, too.

This is the first nec­es­sary step — the camera pro­file trans­lates from the camera’s color “lan­guage” to your RAW converter’s color “lan­guage.” So just use the pro­file that comes with your software.

Do Sweat The Display Profile

Here’s the first place that you’re going to have to create your own pro­file. Each com­puter dis­play, whether it’s an older CRT, a newer LCD or the newest LED design, is a little dif­ferent than every other. You may have your’s set a little brighter than another’s. Your’s may be a little older than another’s and so the colors may have drifted from the new display’s starting point. Or some­thing. This pro­file will “trans­late” between the color “lan­guages” of your RAW con­verter and your display.

The ColorMunki Profiling a Display

So you need to create your own dis­play pro­file for your own dis­play. And you’re going to need some hard­ware help; hard­ware that can “see” color in a stan­dard and repeat­able way. Two pop­ular devices are the ColorMunki and the Spyder4. There are cer­tainly others — and some are quite a bit more expen­sive. But there’s no reason these won’t give excel­lent results. Or even older models of these; think about a Spyder3 from eBay.

Regardless of the device you choose, get one and use its soft­ware and hard­ware to create a pro­file for your exact dis­play. And be sure you’ve set the lumi­nance (bright­ness) to some­thing close to 100 cd/m2. If you make your dis­play too bright, your prints will be too dark.

And Do Sweat the Printer Profiles

Printer pro­files aren’t hard either, but you need them for many of the same rea­sons you need a dis­play pro­file. There’s the dif­ferent color “lan­guage” thing again. And now you have to add in the paper, because each type and brand of paper will repro­duce colors dif­fer­ently. The good news is that almost all paper man­u­fac­turers offer print pro­files for each of their papers tai­lored for the pop­ular photo printers. Get one of those pro­files and you’re going to be golden.

The ColorMunki Creating a Printer Profile

But. If you want to take into account the subtle dif­fer­ences between dif­ferent indi­vidual printers of the same model, you can create your own printer pro­files for each of your paper stocks, too. The more expen­sive printers (think Epson’s pro­fes­sional series printers) are more con­sis­tent in color ren­di­tion from indi­vidual printer to indi­vidual printer. Less expen­sive printers, not as much. Or maybe you don’t have a “pop­ular” photo printer. Or maybe your favorite paper man­u­fac­turer doesn’t have a pro­file for their paper or your printer.

So then you need to create your own pro­files. And again you’re going to need hard­ware such as the ColorMunki (it does double duty for dis­play and print pro­files, which is why I have one for my work) or the SpyderPrint.

Needless to say, there are many more detailed ways to do color man­age­ment and get to 100% per­fect. you can spend a good deal of money on more sophis­ti­cated hard­ware and even training sem­i­nars. But I would sug­gest you give the method dis­cussed here a try first. If you’re not sat­is­fied with the color fidelity of your printed work now, I know you’ll be very happy with the results.

More ColorMunki Printer Profile Experiences

6 Sep 4 Comments Filed Under: Opinion, Printing

I have written before about the ColorMunki’s ease of use and ability to mea­sure a paper and ink’s dMax. Today I want to share a few more expier­ences cre­ating printer ICC profiles.

At this point I’ve cre­ated pro­files for my Epson 3880 using Red River UltraPro Satin, Epson Exhibition Fiber and Moab Lasal Photo Luster papers. I had par­tic­ular interest in the UltraPro Satin because I’ve found the Red River pro­file gen­er­ates banding in cer­tain color gra­di­ents when the rel­a­tive ren­dering intent is used for printing and I wanted to try to fix that.

The short story of many attempts and com­bi­na­tions for the UltraPro Satin is that the ColorMunki pro­file is dif­ferent than Red River’s sup­plied pro­file, but not better. There are still bands in color gra­di­ents, but they are dif­ferent colors. Otherwise its dif­fi­cult to tell the two pro­files apart without exam­ining them side by side — the ColorMunki’s has more intense yel­lows, brighter reds, some­what better sep­a­ra­tion in dark shadow details and a little higher dMax (a “blacker” black). Overall, the ColorMunki did a good job, but didn’t fix my problem.

The ColorMunki did not do nearly as good a job with the Exhibition Fiber. When com­pared to Epson’s sup­plied pro­file, the reds are too dark, banding appears in some color gra­di­ents, shadows are muddy and skin tones are washed out. [See my revi­sion com­ment below] The new pro­file for the Lasal Luster is just fine; and it, too, is very hard to pick out versus Moab’s own pro­file; I think the ColorMunki’s yel­lows are a bit brighter.

So I’m counting my ini­tial expe­ri­ences as a win (Lasal Luster), a draw (UltraPro Satin) and a loss (Exhibition Fiber). I plan to con­tinue using the ColorMunki to create new pro­files for my papers; I sus­pect Ilford’s Galerie Smooth Pearl will be up next. But I’m not sure what to do about the poor pro­file gen­er­ated for the Exhibition Fiber.

All in all, this has not been the home run I was hoping for with respect to get­ting better pro­files for my paper, ink and printer com­bi­na­tions than those pro­files dis­trib­uted by the paper sup­pliers. This may have some­thing to do with the quality of the pro­files pro­vided by the paper sup­pliers and the fact that the 3880 is one of Epson’s “pro­fes­sional” printers that is fac­tory cal­i­brated to be very con­sis­tent from printer to printer.

Profiling my Apple 23” Cinema Display using the ColorMunki worked just fine, pro­ducing a result indis­tin­guish­able from the pro­file cre­ated by X-Rite’s i1 Display 2. And the ColorMunki adds the ability to read spot colors, if you are trying to match an exact color that you have a sample of.

Using a Colormunki To Measure dMax

27 Aug Leave a Comment Filed Under: Printing

The darkest black that a paper and ink com­bi­na­tion can pro­duce is often referred to as the dMax of that pairing. Or some­times simply the dMax of that paper. Its a handy prop­erty of paper to know if you are trying to chose between papers you may not have seen and need a paper with strong deep blacks. Those printing in black and white are often con­cerned about how deep their shadows can be repro­duced on a given paper.

If you have a spec­tropho­tometer, such as the X-Rite ColorMunki, you can mea­sure the dMax of your own paper and ink com­bi­na­tions. I gen­er­ally use the test image offered by Digital Outback Photo. One of its con­ve­nient fea­tures is that it has a large, pure black square in its upper right hand corner per­fect for mea­suring dMax.

With the ColorMunki in spot color mode, read the black spot and note its L* value shown. For better accu­racy, you may even want to mea­sure the spot a couple of dif­ferent time in slightly dif­ferent places and average the L* values. You can con­vert the L* value to dMax if you know a few color theory equa­tions. If you don’t, and I surely do not, you can go to Bruce Lindbloom’s web site and use his com­panding cal­cu­lator instead. You’ll can find it on his Calc page; the second item.

Fill in the L* value you got from the ColorMunki and read back the Density (which is what his cal­cu­lator calls dMax). Pretty simple.

So what’s a “good” dMax and what’s a “bad” one? Generally speaking the glossy papers have the greatest dMax values and those are usu­ally above 2.1. The semigloss/luster papers are next in the high 1s and low 2s. Matte papers have the lowest dMax values, even using the MK inks in today’s inkjet photo printers, and fall in the mid to lower 1s. But a 2.3 is not nec­es­sarily “good” if you’re looking for a soft, dreamy look. But if you want deep shadows drifting off to black, a paper with a dMax of 1.46 may not give you want you want.

If you’d like to see the dMax values someone else has mea­sured for a pretty wide range of papers, check out Dane Creek Photography’s Inkjet Paper Database.