Archive of Printing Posts

Simple Color Management

22 Apr
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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 (to my 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 from 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
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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
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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.

The ColorMunki for Color Management

8 Aug
2 Comments
Filed Under: Photography, Printing

The Hardware

I have, for a very long time, profiled my monitors with the DataColor Spyder 2 (no longer made) and later, the X-Rite Eye-One Display 2. To complete the color management chain to my printer, I had been depending on ICC profiles provided by others, whether those were the included Epson profiles, those from Red River Paper, Moab, or whoever. Recently, after having some problems with Red River Paper profiles and my new Epson 3880, I decided to go the next step and create my own printer/paper/ink ICC profiles and so bought the X-Rite ColorMunki.

There’s no need for me to do a full scale ColorMunki review here as others have already done so, and done a very nice job:

So I’ll just make a few comments based on my initial expe­rience creating profiles for Red River UltraPro Satin and Moab Lasal Photo Luster (my favorite “everyday” paper).

Scanning Color Swatches

Ease of Use — with my expe­rience from using other monitor profile systems, getting up and running with the ColorMunki was very straight forward. It is partic­u­larly nice that the target color test charts print out very large color swatches which make them very easy to scan.

An Epson Watch Out — the instruc­tions remind you, but be very sure to set Color Matching to ‘EPSON Color Controls’ and Color Mode to ‘Off (No Color Management)’, at least for the Epson 3880. This seems a bit counter intu­itive, but I can tell you it makes a difference (and wastes some paper if you forget).

A Mac OS X 10.6 Watch Out — I’ve read in several places that current versions of the Mac OS (10.6.4 right now) have problems using version 4 ICC profiles. I don’t know the details, but I used the ColorMunki software pref­er­ences to select version 2 ICC profiles and every­thing has worked fine.

Outback Print Test Image

Find A Good Test Image — to best judge your results, I’d recommend finding and using the same test image for comparing one profile, one paper to another, and so on. My test image of choice is the one from Digital Outback Photo. I like it because it provides gradients and incre­mental black and white blocks along with some typical images. The essay on their web site also provides some handy guidance on how to interpret your results.

Results — to start with, you’d expect ICC profiles offered by the paper suppliers to be very good for the Epson 3880 as the pro printers from Epson are more consistent in color response from printer to printer. Having said that, to my eye I got a very good, and slightly better than Moab’s, profile for the Moab Lasal Photo Luster paper; colors were slightly richer and contrast slightly better. The Red River UltraPro Satin profile was somewhat a mixed bag. Red River’s profile gave me some slight banding in the test image’s color gradients, which is what got me started thinking about making my own profiles in the first place. The ColorMunki profile also created some of the same banding, but in different color gradients. Otherwise the ColorMunki profile also showed richer colors and enhanced contrast. Perhaps there’s some­thing about the Red River UltraPro Satin paper and the Epson 3880 inks that doesn’t work well together. That’s a pity.

Although the paper suppliers do a nice job providing generally good ICC profiles for their papers, its very likely that you will get a slightly better profile if you make your own using your own printer. And if the paper you’d like to try has no profile available for your printer, then you will have to make your own. In either case, I think the ColorMunki is a great choice at a reasonable price.

First Update

A point I should have made above is the distinction between a spec­tropho­tometer and a colorimeter. Unless you’re a scientist or an ultra-geek, the hardware differ­ences aren’t important. What’s important is that a spec­tropho­tometer can read color infor­mation from displays (emission), papers (reflection) or projectors (emission). A colorimeter can only read from displays (emissive sources).

The ColorMunki is a spec­tropho­tometer, good for all the sources important to photog­ra­phers. Systems, such as theEye-One Display 2, are colorimeters and can only be used to measure displays.

Second Update

I received a question from a Windows 7 user asking about where in the Mac OS Epson driver dialog boxes were the two different color control settings, Color Matching and Color Mode. To make that all more clear, here are the two places I meant:

Color Matching Set To ‘Epson Color Controls’

Color Mode Set To ‘Off (No Color Management)’

A Gloss Differential Study For The Epson 3880

18 Jul
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Filed Under: Photography, Printing

I’ve had my Epson Stylus Pro 3880 for a couple of weeks now and have been printing a number of test images (using Digital Outback Photo’s test image) to under­stand how the printer performs on different papers — different finishes and different manu­fac­turers. Of special interest to me during this testing was the amount of gloss differ­ential exhibited by the different papers; gloss differ­ential being the difference in gloss between the printer’s ink and the paper itself. Any image that has areas of pure white will expose the paper in those places and poten­tialy produce gloss differential.

Different people are going to see this gloss differ­ential differ­ently. Some may not notice it at all and I suspect that will be most people. Others will be more exacting and may see, and object to, the differ­ential. Framed and glazed prints will look very different that a print help in the hand. Some this issue of gloss differ­ential, if it is an issue at all, depends on many vari­ables. For my purposes, I took a very exacting, perhaps even picky, approach to eval­u­ating my test prints. I wanted to see what the most discerning viewer of my images would see.

My taste in papers is for less gloss. I very much like the finish of matte papers, but don’t like giving up the superior dMax capa­bility of glossier papers. So my bias runs more towards the luster/pearl/semigloss finishes that are on the less glossy side of the spectrum. I had a number of papers on hand and ordered a couple of sample packs to give me a greater range of possi­bil­ities. Because matte papers have no gloss differ­ential, I’ll leave out the discussion of those papers here and concen­trate on the glossy finishes.

Having said all that, here’s the list of papers I tested:

  • Canson Baryta Photographique
  • Epson Premium Glossy, Premium Semigloss, and Premium Luster
  • Epson Exhibition Fiber
  • Ilford Galerie Smooth Gloss and Smooth Pearl
  • Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk
  • Moab Lasal Photo Gloss and Photo Luster
  • Moab Colorado Fiber Gloss and Fiber Satine
  • Red River UltraPro Gloss 2.0, UltraPro Satin 2.0, and Arctic Polar Satin

The short version of the results is that all these papers exhibited some level of gloss differ­ential. Some show it very slightly, while others show it more noticeably. But in no case did my wife (a non-photographer and non-pixel peeper) notice anything “wrong” with any of the prints.

In my opinion, the very glossy papers tend to minimize the gloss differ­ential —  its there, but you really need to look. Of the glossies, I’d say the Moab Colorado Fiber Gloss showed the least. But its a close call and all these papers were good.

Because I’m not fond of the glossy look, I spent a great deal of time looking at the luster/satin/pearl finishes. And I printed more test images on more of those papers. Unfortunately they almost all showed more gloss differ­ential than the glossy papers; Epson’s UltraChrome K3 inks are very glossy. To my eye, the Epson Exhibition Fiber was clearly the best of the group and compet­itive with the glossy papers; its gloss differ­ential was very, very slight. The rest had noticeable gloss differ­ential when examined closely.

In the end, I’ll be using the Moab Lasal Photo Luster as my “everyday” paper. Its gloss differ­ential is well controlled, although still noticeable, and its low gloss finish suits my eye. For “pro” paper needing the very best perfor­mance I’ll use the Canson Baryta Photographique for its minimal gloss differ­ential and its archival prop­erties (100% alpha cellulose base, minimal use of OBAs and buffered coating). And, again, my wife saw nothing objec­tionable in any of the samples.

While testing the Red River papers I ran into an odd problem. Every test print on their papers using their provided ICC profiles produced banding in the gradients at the lower left of the test image when printed with the relative rendering intent. There was no such banding when printing with the perceptual rending intent, or when using Epson’s Premium Luster profile. I can only assume there is some issue with their profiles, but Drew Hendricks, of Red River Papers, discussed the issue with me via email and with their profile supplier (Chromix) and has concluded its not. Regardless, I can’t print reliably to Red River papers using their supplied profiles.

For more detailed infor­mation about these papers, I’d recommend, in addition to the manufacturer’s websites linked to above, the excellent Inkjet Paper Database main­tained at Dane Creek Folio Covers.

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Who Is Bob Rockefeller?

I’m a pho­tog­ra­pher and a Macintosh user who shoots what catches my eye and tries to remember David duChemin’s credo: “Gear is Good. Vision is Better.” I also dabble in HTML, CSS and WordPress coding. [Read More …]

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