[RockvilleBob]

I have the K-3 color space set to sRGB. The printing services I use (Bay Photo and Black River) require sRGB files. My confusion is settings for image processing. I've been advised to make sure my monitor is calibrated, I do this regularly, and the color space in Photoshop is set to Adobe 1998 to provide a larger, richer color space. Then the job is do editing in 1998 space and convert final image back to sRGB for printing.

I keep asking myself why am I going from Camera sRGB to Photoshop Adobe 1998 and then convert back to sRGB for sending the file out to be printed?

The services I use provide color correction for their ICC printer profile. Another suggestion was to get the ICC provile from the printer services and do my own color correction. I do not understand the advantage, other than the cost, for doing my own color correction. Additionally I do aluminum metal prints and color correction is included in the price.

So I would like some thoughts on why do the middle step of switching color spaces when the camera and printing step (the first and last steps) are sRGB.

There must be good reasons for people saying that Adobe 1998 is the way to go but I don't understand why.

I also do not understand why I should do my color corrections using ICC profiles for final printers if the service printing company does this service. I would guess they would color correct better than me and if there is no charge, the case of metal prints,why take on that work?

Thanks for your advice and comments.

[Miguel]

I keep asking myself why am I going from Camera sRGB to Photoshop Adobe 1998 and then convert back to sRGB for sending the file out to be printed?

Follow this. You haven't articulated whether you are shooting jpeg or Raw. If the former, set your camera for AdobeRGB and then export or save as RGB for printing.

The services I use provide color correction for their ICC printer profile. Another suggestion was to get the ICC profile from the printer services and do my own color correction.

You are slightly confused and it is understandable because the semantics around photographic language are contradictory and unclear. Generally, "color correction" provided by a printer is getting the white balance right. Using a printer's profile is more to ensure that the colors in your image file can be accurately reproduced by the printer. Areas that are "out of gamut" get highlighted by soft proofing. So you tweak lightness to reign colors in often. To literate folk, this is a form of pure color correction, but technically it's related but a tad different.

M

[NicoleC]

I also do not understand why I should do my color corrections using ICC profiles for final printers if the service printing company does this service. I would guess they would color correct better than me and if there is no charge, the case of metal prints,why take on that work?

What is "correct?"

If you don't do it yourself, your purple flower may turn out blue. Or pink. You want the printer to print the colors YOU want. It can make a big difference in the final image.

[maxfield_photo]

I agree, Bob, it makes no sense to set your working space in Photoshop to AdobeRGB if the image was captured in sRGB, it's not like you're magically inventing any new color information by doing so. I guess you gain a little bit of latitude in editing, but then you end up losing it again when you go to print. The answer is to set the camera to capture the most information possible (i.e. either RAW which is 12 or 14 bit, or if you shoot JPEG, AdobeRGB, which is 8 bit, but with a wider gamut than sRGB) and then convert to the color space required by your lab at the time of printing.

Now if you shoot RAW, it's a different story. RAW doesn't have a color space associated with it, but it's huge. The closest industry-standard space to RAW is ProPhoto RGB. Now ProPhoto is huge as well, and you'll get huge files if you work in it, but it's the only way to preserve all the information from your RAW files when you edit. Labs don't take ProPhoto however, so you'll have to remember to convert to sRGB when you export for print, or AdobeRGB if you're lucky enough to have a lab that accepts it.

There's also the issue of your display. Most monitors can display most of sRGB, some high end monitors can display most of Adobe RGB, like 97%+. I don't think that any commercially available monitor can even come close to displaying 97% of ProPhoto RGB, so the question becomes, 'Why edit in a color space where you can't even see the changes you're making?' It's a very valid question. I can tell you that I have a high end photo monitor, and that I work in ProPhoto rather than AdobeRGB, but it was a decision that I came to based on what worked best for me, and I did a lot of testing before settling on my workflow. My suggestion would be to try it both ways, and see what works for you. But as for sRGB, no, only use it for export.

Here's a video series by Canadian photographer Dave Morris that explains it as well as anything I've seen (and I've seen a LOT)

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

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Last edited by maxfield_photo; 12-04-2013 at 12:15 PM.

[jatrax]

Thanks for those links very interesting.

[emalvick]

I like to think of the color space a bit as you might other related digital photography terms.

AdobeRGB and ProPhotoRGB are kind of like RAW or Tiff. You use the formats to keep all the information you can, but, when you pass it on to others you have to change it to something that others can easily use. For RAW and Tiff we end up saving as JPG or PNG (or something related) to distribute. For colorspace, we choose sRGB.

Now if you capture the image in sRGB, then converting it to the larger colorspaces doesn't really add information just like coverting a JPG to TIFF won't gain any data. The conversion may give you more leverage, but I'm guessing that can't really be quantified, and it's probably even more difficult to evaluate with color spaces.

[RockvilleBob]

Here's a video series by Canadian photographer Dave Morris that explains it as well as anything I've seen (and I've seen a LOT)
Colour Space and ICC profiles explained Vol 1 - YouTube


Morris Studios Printing Colour Space P1 - YouTube


Morris Studios Printing Colour Space P2 - YouTube

Thank you very much, the best 20 minutes I've spent swimming in color space! For years I've been shooting in RAW but using the default sRGB. What a kick in the butt to see how dumb I've been. I will use ProPhoto RGB for Photoshop, it seems it would make files I edit today usable on new and better future printers. The monitor may not show the whole space but I do not loose anything.

I do have a question about printing. I send my files out to be printed. While I shoot thousands of pictures I only print a few annually. I've been using Bay Photo which requires sRGB JPEG files! So now in my mind I've captured as much as possible in the camera with ADOBE RGB, I then use the largest color workspace with ProPhoto RGB but when all is said and done I shrink it all down into an sRGB file.

It seems what I need to find is a print lab that will send me their ICC profile which I can use to soft proof and make sure my 8 inch blue square comes out as an 8 inch blue square but also lets me send a file with all that information to them for printing.

Am I off base here? Is there such a lab that supplies ICC profiles for printers and accepts ProPhoto RGB files color corrected with the ICC profile of the lab's printer?

[Miguel]

Am I off base here? Is there such a lab that supplies ICC profiles for printers and accepts ProPhoto RGB files color corrected with the ICC profile of the lab's printer?

Yes, you are asking too much of the theoretical to be practical. Most printers stay with sRGB and jpeg. For 98% of all users that is quite good enough. Find a photography friend who has a decent printer. Print out two versions of a typical print you would make. One version would be TIFF AdobeRGB; the other a mid-level jpg sRGB. See if you can blindly spot the difference; ask others to blindly ID any differences. That will tell you something.

ProPhoto RGB is more of a theoretical space than a practical one. Its value is more for the future as you have surmised. I cannot tell the difference between a ProPhoto RGB image on either of my IPS hardware calibrated monitors and an Adobe RGB version--and sometimes an sRGB version. Same with some prints. It really depends on the intensity of the blues and greens you got going down in the image.

M

[Joojoo2010]

Short answer with mobile. Use printing icc in photoshop proof mode to see how ur pic will fit print gamut, reduce color saturation if needed.

[RockvilleBob]

Yes, you are asking too much of the theoretical to be practical. Most printers stay with sRGB and jpeg. For 98% of all users that is quite good enough. Find a photography friend who has a decent printer. Print out two versions of a typical print you would make. One version would be TIFF AdobeRGB; the other a mid-level jpg sRGB. See if you can blindly spot the difference; ask others to blindly ID any differences. That will tell you something.

ProPhoto RGB is more of a theoretical space than a practical one. Its value is more for the future as you have surmised. I cannot tell the difference between a ProPhoto RGB image on either of my IPS hardware calibrated monitors and an Adobe RGB version--and sometimes an sRGB version. Same with some prints. It really depends on the intensity of the blues and greens you got going down in the image.

M

A few years ago I mhad a 4 foot by 3 foot metal print made at Bay Photo. It was an HDR panorama made from several hundred files. I sent this file to Bay via FTP as a TIFF file. I just checked thier site and they do accept TIFF submissions. I have gone to just printing on metal since I only do a few prints a year, they look spectacular, and they work out to be about the same price since printing on paper entailed matting and framing. Metal prints can hang directly on the wall. In addition I print to any size I want whereas to use off the shelf frames I printed to standard sizes before metal.

It looks like Bay Photo still accepts TIFF and PNG files.

File Preparation Guidelines | ROES, Digital Prints ? Bay Photo Lab

Bay Photo includes color correction with no additional charge for metal prints.

What I need to explore is what happens to the files when they arrive ..... I bet ..... converted to sRGB?

[Miguel]

I bet ..... converted to sRGB

Write them and find out.

M

[RockvilleBob]

Write them and find out.

M

As suspected but they do provide a guarantee
I am guessing that printers pretty much cannot do much outside the sRGB space or there would be alternatives available from "Professional Labs" - - here's the correspondence:


Subject: ICC Profile
DEC 05, 2013 | 06:11PM PST
Hilary replied:
Hello Bob!
Thank you for following up on this!
The file will be printed in sRGB.
We do have an ICC profile on our website so that you can download and soft proof your images. It will be found under Downloa
We do calibrate our machines to match eachother. However, we always recommend using Color Correction for the Metal Prints. Our color correction is guaranteed. If you are unhappy with our color correction and it was within our abilities to fix, we will redo the print for free! With No Color Correction, the customer is responsible for managing the color and brightness of the print.
There is no additional charge for this service with Metal Prints. The process is not the same as the Photographic. Images will be luminous and look different. We can check the file and make sure that it will transmit.
Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Hilary Filiault
Bay Photo Lab
Bay Photo Lab ? Professional Photo Printing | Digital Prints, Photo Canvas, MetalPrints, ThinWraps, Albums, Books, ROES

DEC 04, 2013 | 03:12PM PST
Original message
Bob wrote:

Hi

Can you supply the ICC profile for your "Metal Print" printer? I would
like to place an order for metal prints and want to do my own color
correction.

I will also submit the resulting file as a TIFF file to preserve as much
as I can. Will you print this file without conversion to sRGB? or do you
convert submitted TIFF files to sRGB prior to printing.

It seems to me that making an HDR image, converting to 8 bit tiff and
then color correcting would be self defeating if the file was then
compressed into a jpeg file in sRGB color space

[maxfield_photo]

For years I've been shooting in RAW but using the default sRGB.

Just to clarify a point, if you shoot in RAW, the camera ignores any color spaces settings and just captures everything. It also ignores any settings for saturation, or contrast, or sharpness, etc... everything in that image menu applies to jpegs only, though it will affect the jpeg preview image that you see on your camera's LCD. But yeah, when you work in Photoshop or any other application, use the largest color space available to you, until it's time to export.

Now a couple words on exporting. if you send your work out to a photo lab, yes, you should definitely try to get an ICC profile from them for soft proofing. In your soft proofing, you will get a choice of rendering intents. There are two main ones that photographers use, perceptual and relative colorimetric. Perceptual takes the entire larger color space and "resizes" it to fit in the smaller color space, this preserves the relationships between colors, and reduces banding, but can sometimes lead to "flat" looking colors. Relative Colorimetric takes any colors that are out-of-gamut in the smaller color space, and squishes them in to the nearest color that is in-gamut. For many images relative colorimetric is fine, and it will keep your colors looking "crisp", but there is the risk of banding, so watch your gradients. Basically I recommend trying both menu options, perceptual and relative colorimetric, and see which one works best for your particular image. If your lab doesn't offer ICC profiles, I would suggest finding a new lab, but if you're really devoted to a lab that doesn't offer them, there are companies out there that will generate a profile for you, it's expensive though. You can also do it yourself if you have certain Xrite or Datacolor spectrophotometers, but it's likely that if you own something like that either a) you're doing your own printing, or b) sending your stuff to a pro lab that is even more obsessive about color than you are.

You also want to soft proof when exporting images to the web. Most web browsers are not ICC aware, which means they will ignore any color profiles that you embed in your images. The result is if you prepare a great image of the kids at Christmas to send to Grandma, and export it to the web as a ProPhoto 16-bit Tiff, the colors will look very muddy when she goes to view them with her non-aware web browser. sRGB is the lowest common denominator of color spaces, meaning that it's akin to having no ICC profile, SO when preparing images for the web, you should always assume your viewer's computer is "color blind" and soft proof with sRGB, make any adjustments you need on a layer, and then export to sRGB.

One more word of caution: Photoshop has a menu item called "Save for Web and Device...", it does a bunch of things for you like flatten your image to a single layer, change it to 8-bit, and change the color space to something more universal (a lot of times it will give you a warning by the way that your files is too large, and that you may experience slow processing time, you can ignore this), if you use this feature, be sure you're looking at the "Optimized" tab, and check the "convert to sRGB" box. BUT, you don't get a choice of rendering intent with the Save for Web and Device option (at least in my ancient version of Photoshop CS4), so you may prefer to do it manually. ALSO, and this is huge, if you image is already in sRGB, and you check the "convert to sRGB" box, Photoshop will convert it again. This will desaturate your image slightly, it shouldn't and I can't explain why it does, but it does. Don't use the "convert to sRGB" checkbox if your image is already in sRGB!

Hope that's helpful.

[RockvilleBob]

Just to clarify a point, if you shoot in RAW, the camera ignores any color spaces settings and just captures everything. It also ignores any settings for saturation, or contrast, or sharpness, etc... everything in that image menu applies to jpegs only, though it will affect the jpeg preview image that you see on your camera's LCD. But yeah, when you work in Photoshop or any other application, use the largest color space available to you, until it's time to export.

.........

Hope that's helpful.

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this to me, very helpful

[Oldbayrunner]

If you are happy with their color corrected photo you may consider staying with that as once you start dealing with monitor calibration, ICC profiles, proofing with your monitor using the labs ICC profiles there are certain other things then color space you will need to insure you have and do to be able to get to the point that what you see on your monitor will print the reasonably the same as the labs output or even your own photo color printer and paper.

What I don't think has been mentioned is;

One, if you are not using a CRT, IPS or at least an LED monitor as a last choice there is no way you can get your monitor calibrated correct enough to fine tune it to a point that utilizing their profiles will reasonably print what you see on your monitor.

Two, you need to use a a good color calibration tool of some kind to calibrate your monitor and keep it calibrated. Then you will be able to utilize editing and proofing with the labs ICC without color corrections for print. If you do proof them then you certainly do not want to make the mistake of selecting color corrected or they will not be the same.

Three, I dont know if you know this one, you have to consider DPI and pixel dimensions for the size prints and send those correctly other wise the lab will crop your photos or expand them leaving unwanted results.

It has been my experience some labs will also for the price of shipping send you proofs prior to printing allowing you the opportunity to make changes.