Color Management

[philgabe]

Hello everyone!

I am trying to coordinate colors between my D30, monitor and printer and am failing miserably. I read about color management an color profiles but I really haven't managed to get everything to work okay. I use Photshop element and print on a Canon BJ 600. If someone could be so kind as to walk me through the steps necessary to get all the hardware to agree on color, I would be forever thankful.

PS: I have downloaded the D30 color profile and don't know what to do with it....I suspect that may be part of the problem???

Cheers!

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Phil,

Hopefully, someone who really understands colour management will also respond to your query, but my understanding (with apologies to anyone who knows better) is that you cannot really do proper colour balancing between all your input/output devices without getting hold of fancy and expensive packages that have widgets to measure this as well as software (I read about something called EZMonaco a lot).

I use Photoshop rather than Photoshop Elements, so I don't know for certain, if you can do all this with PE, but you should be able to check easily enough.

There are some "simple" things:

1. Adjust your monitor colour balance. Grownup Photoshop has something called Adobe Gamma, I guess Elements does to. You will find it in the Control Panel. Use the wizard and follow on-screen instructions - dead simple.

2. Again not sure if PS and PS Elements work the same, but in PS when you first open an image you are given the option to assign a colour profile. It is at this point that you can assign the D30 profile to your image. What I do in PS is assign the profile and then immediately convert to the working profile. I use the Adobe RGB. You don't say where you go your D30 proifle, but I assume it is an ICC profile. You might also like to look at www.fredmiranda.com (if you haven't) as Fred has several free D30 profiles for download.

3. You should also be able to assign a profile to your printer, but... different papers have different colour profiles. I would check the Canon web site or do a Google search for profiles for your printer.

Finally, don't forget it will be impossibe to get everything looking exactly the same - your monitor and your printer use different technology to produce colour and they don't have the same colour gamut.

Another problem you may find is using JPEG vs raw format. Although raw does take up more space and is slower to shoot, it will give you better control for post-processing as you cannot "fix" a lot more stuff.

Regards,

Roger

[Pekka]

Check out http://www.aim-dtp.net/
A controversial site, sometimes a bit difficult to understand, but could give you ideas on how to proceed. The gamma and black point setups are most important, see http://www.aim-dtp.net/aim/evaluation/gamma_space/index.htm

He offers also a beta version of a profiler software, XLprofiler, which lets you do your own ICC profiles very accurately (let us know if it is indeed so!).

See also http://desktoppub.miningco.com/cs/colorcalibration/ and search the web for more.