calibration

Ok ao i calibrated my monitor and now i open and process a photo in photoshop....what profile do i use.........do i keep it as adobe RGB or do i convert to my monitors profile?.....i am new to this so the comments would be greatly appreciated.........al​so let me know what you think of these photos on this sitehttp://www.flickr.com/​photos/rossanos__photo​s/....in terms of colour and how they look on your screen if yours is calibrated.

All of the shots seem a bit underexposed (too dark) to me. The colors are OK, but I can't tell if they are really accurate.

How did you "calibrate" your monitor? If you merely used software along with your eyes and personal judgement, you probably need to get a proper package which uses a colorimeter to get truly correct results.

One way to determine whether or not you really have it right is to take a photo of a Gretag MacBeth ColorChecker chart and see if the results on your screen match the original color chart. What is a Gretag MacBeth chart? Here's a photo of one so you know what I am talking about (the card is about 8-1/2 by 11 inches in size):

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You alaways work in SRGB profile mode. You convert to the printer profile just before printing. If you use a printer profile to edit the file, and then go to a printer with a larger gamma, you effectivly loose all the information gained with the wider gamma support of the other printer.

AKA - SRGB to work in.
Printer when your ready to print.

SkipD wrote:
All of the shots seem a bit underexposed (too dark) to me. The colors are OK, but I can't tell if they are really accurate.

How did you "calibrate" your monitor? If you merely used software along with your eyes and personal judgement, you probably need to get a proper package which uses a colorimeter to get truly correct results.

One way to determine whether or not you really have it right is to take a photo of a Gretag MacBeth ColorChecker chart and see if the results on your screen match the original color chart. What is a Gretag MacBeth chart? Here's a photo of one so you know what I am talking about (the card is about 8-1/2 by 11 inches in size):

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forum: RAW, Post Processing & Printing

I used the Spyder2 calibration software

I have the old Colorvision package, so can't comment on the new package but I would believe that it's a good one.

I remember doing some rather fussy adjustments to my monitor prior to using the Spyder to calibrate the colors. That set the darkest and brightest points that the monitor displays. That is a really critical step.

Also - are you using a conventional CRT or an LCD display? I have found that the various LCD (laptop) displays which I have tried to calibrate (all fairly high end Dell units) were never anywhere near as good as the CRT monitors I have used. The calibration process results were poor and the really bad thing about them has been the variation you get with different (even slightly different) viewing angles.

Let me see if I can help you de-mystify color management a bit as I have just spent the last few weeks in books, internet articles, and forums myself for this very thing. What I've been able to gather is... the monitor profile will make sure that your monitor is showing you the colors and levels that you are supposed to be seeing. The profile you build with your spyder, or any other pofile maker should be applied to your monitor's color management settings and that will ensure that you are seeing correct color representation on your screen. sRGB or aRGB are the primary color spaces you should work with in photoshop. I currently use sRGB because every online digital printing service uses sRGB calibrated printers and sRGB will fit inside aRGB's color gamut so to convert to aRGB I would not lose any color information. Remember that to a computer, a color is just a number. And while the color's numbers covered in sRGB all fit inside aRGB's space... the same cannot be said obviously for the opposite.

For my personal printer, I use a specific printer profile which is also a wider color gamut than sRGB so converting to that printer profile would result in a near perfect match of colors. I believe if I were working with aRGB, it would not as aRGB is a wider gamut than the printer profile for my printer/paper combo. That conversion would result in a slight shift in shade and possibly hue due to a condition known as being out of gamut, and I would have to make edits to get the image back the way I had it before the conversion.

I will save a few copies of every image I want printed depending on how many prints and in what size(s) I want. The original will be saved in sRGB and then I will convert the sRGB image to my printer profile and I will crop and resize it to the print size I intend to output. I have a Canon IP6600 printer and I primarily use Canon premium glossy paper. So I use the canned printer profile for this combo which came with my printer on a CD. I find that It's close enough without needing to calibrate the printer. All printers are different even within like models, but they are all close enough together that the profile is usable. Before printing though, I will soft proof with that printer profile to see how it will look when printed. I currently use adobe's gamma software to calibrate. While it's not exact it's fairly close. It's critical to use a calibrated monitor for soft proofing so you know what you are working with. I have the Monoco Optix XR on it's way to me and it should be here tomorrow so my prints should start looking to be exactly like the monitor where the human eye couldn't really see any difference. Right now you can see a slight difference but it looks close enough to be good still. Now if I were to decide that I want to use a different paper on my printer, I could test it using the profile of the paper I use and I've seen some paper that looks pretty close while still not the same, and I've seen paper that was just as far off as it could possibley be without being a totally different color. If I wanted to continue using that paper, I would have to calibrate and create a printer profile for that specific paper/printer combo. The I would have to soft proof the image in that profile and convert the sRGB image to that profile for printing. Some high end papers aleady have printer/paper profiles for specific printers that are downloadable so check that first.


EDIT: The whole concept of fitting inside a gamut may confuse some people.... so to simplify it, I thought of this analogy. This of the cup of coffee you pick up on the way to work as your starting image and let's pretend that where you work that particular cup that the coffee is in is not allowed and you must put it into a different cup before entering the workplace. If the cup that you have in your vehicle that is allowed is only a 16oz cup, would you order a 20oz coffee? Of course not because you wouldn't be able to fit that 20oz of coffee into the 16oz cup. However, you could order an 8, 10, or 12oz coffee because any of these will fit inside your cup without spilling over.

I am using a DELL 1704 LCD MONITOR

John,
I like your coffee analogy!
I'm still new to color management, and I hadn't thought about working in a smaller gamut when the target is a larger gamut. I was more used to using a larger working space, and then using soft-proofing and edits to make sure that your image will fit in the smaller target gamut with minimal clipping. Are these just two different ways of working, or am I missing something?

To go with your analogy, your target cup is 8 oz., but your coffee shop gives you 12 oz. for the same price as 8 (that is, your camera's gamut is larger than your printer's). You get 12 oz, but put it in a 20 oz cup (your working space), doctor it up with cream and sugar, since you've got lots of spare space in the cup, and once you have the taste right, you pour out the perfect 8 oz into the target cup.

lol... almost. I actually shoot RAW so when I convert to JPEG with ACR, I use the sRGB space. So I guess using my analogy... the coffee I order will be only as small as my smallest target cup. I order the sRGB size. I only convert to a larger gamut when I need to print at home... otherwise I stay in sRGB since the services I use for prints print in that space, and I don't have to convert anything for them. But my home printer uses a custom color space based on the aRGB space. So let's call sRGB a small coffee and aRGB a large cup. I always order the small so if I don't have to pour it into another cup I don't leave myself with not enough coffee... but if I do have to pour it into another cup which is the large, I don't waste or lose any of the coffee that I started out with. I hope that makes sense to someone else besides me...

If you choose to work in wider colour spaces, it helps if you understand rendering intents and have accurate monitor and printer profiles that you can soft proof.

If you are working a wider colour space than your target device, how the colours are represented on the target device depends on the rendering intent. Typically, Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric are used for photographic work, though Absolute Colorimetric sometimes has a place for photos.

This article is a very helpful guide to Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric.


There is certainly an argument to working in sRGB throughout if you know you need sRGB output. If you work in 8 bit Adobe RGB, then convert to 8 bit sRGB, posterisation is possible - ideally you should work in 16 bit when using medium wide colour spaces (such as Adobe RGB) and it's really mandatory for wide colour spaces (such as ProPhoto RGB). You should convert to the target colour space before converting to 8 bit if you need 8 bit output.


You can't get away from the fact that your camera is capable of colours outside even Adobe RGB - digital cameras and scanners usually are. Most RAW converters are capable of converting into a wide colour space, such as ProPhoto RGB. You may or may not have control over how the conversion to a narrower colour space is made - if you convert to 16 bit ProPhoto RGB and make the conversion in Photoshop to a narrower space, then you have complete control over the rendering intent and related settings. However, this way of working requires some idea of what you're doing.

Once you've put an image in a colour space, colours outside that gamut of the colour space are lost for ever. If there were colours outside that gamut in the source colour space, how the conversion is made depends on the rendering intent (indeed, colours inside the gamut of the destination space are shifted if you use Perceptual). If you work with a typical photo quality inkjet, especially a 6 or more ink model, it will be capable of printing some colours outside the sRGB gamut, and an all sRGB workflow removes that opportunity.


Like many workflow issues, it's down to the photographer. If you shoot a lot of school photos or similar under controlled conditions, and they're printed by a lab that takes sRGB files, then shooting sRGB JPEG with the appropriate white balance and other in-camera parameters, such as sharpening, set makes sense. There's no need to post-process all those images - that's just a waste of time and money if you can get things right in the camera.

My photography is more artistic than that. I usually shoot RAW and work in 16 bit ProPhoto RGB in Photoshop (and yes - I am aware that I can't see many of the colours on screen in doing this), then convert in Photoshop to the desired destination space and bit depth.


I accept that there is an argument to keep everything sRGB because it's simple, but I believe it is worth getting to grip with rendering intents and considering the use of wider colour spaces when they are appropriate.

David

That's silly! Of course, I would still order the 20 oz cup of coffee.
I would drink 4 oz of it while I'm driving to work and then pour the rest into the 16 oz cup.

I was waiting for that. I'll let you in on a little secret.... I would too.


David,

To be honest with you, I'd never considered working in 16 bit mainly because my PC was really too slow for that. I tried once and just to get it from ACR to Photoshop took forever. I have (as of yesterday) increase my CPU X2 and my memory has doubled as well. I went from a P3-1.12Ghz with 512MB to an Athlon 64 3300+(which is 2.4 Ghz) and 1 Gig of RAM. I also bought a new 160Gig hard disk to compliment my 120Gig. I tried a photo start to finish from RAW to Pro-photo RGB 16bit in Photoshop. Proofed and printed in my printer/paper combo's profile and I must say that it produced very good results. I'll be looking more into your workflow. But for my regular workflow, I will keep it simple for the large scale shoots like weddings and school funtions to save on time. I always have the RAW files to go back and approach it with a more artistic approach like yours afterward. Thanks for your post, I found it very enlightening.