Info and help request. Color management (Mac and Canon printer).

[Grandad35]

I need to be able to softproof while editing RAW to see on my monitor how image changes. The profile for softproofing will be my camera profile not printer.

ACR doesn't support softproofing; it only outputs images in a predefined color space (e.g. sRGB/aRGB/PhotoPro RGB/ColorMatch RGB).

Then images can be processed to JPG, or TIFF files to edit them later in photoshop etc. Then you should softproof in photoshop with your printer profile to see how it looks before printing.

That is exactly how it works. You keep your images in one of the standard color spaces, soft proof them with your output device's profile, make adjustments based on what you see in the doft proof, and send your finished image (still in one of the standard color spaces) to a printing package that handles the profile conversion and sends the data to the the printer.

Note that many commercial photo printers (e.g. Costco, WalMart, etc.) assume that all images are sRGB, and will ignore other color spaces (screwing up your colors).

 

[Smile]

ACR doesn't support softproofing; it only outputs images in a predefined color space (e.g. sRGB/aRGB/PhotoPro RGB/ColorMatch RGB).

I tried the trial of bibble pro and it seems to work with soft proofing. I can set input output icc profiles and get live update on my image. Then when I export to TIFF or JPG the profile is attached to the image.

Note that many commercial photo printers (e.g. Costco, WalMart, etc.) assume that all images are sRGB, and will ignore other color spaces (screwing up your colors).

It's not they assume sRTB but they convert to it and as far as I know ignore attached profiles so not your RGB 40D photo will lose colors if you have any camera profiles attached you loose them too.

That's why printing photos at home is going to be big in near future the only problem I see is that color management required to get the colors right is intentionally or not but too hard than it suppose to be.

 

[Grandad35]

Smile,

I posted a question on a forum populated by people much more knowledgeable in this area than I. There was only a single reply, but it points to some more information on calibrating ACR, including 3 additional calibration approaches.

Reading through these links refreshed my memory on ACR's standard profiles - this is from one of the links:

Camera Raw has two profiles for every supported camera. One is created under illuminant D65 (6500K) and the other under illuminant A (2856K). The origin image profile is created per interpolation or extrapolation starting from these profiles, depending on white balance setting. At the end the profile is corrected by the movement of the sliders in the Calibrate tab.

This points up the need to generate a separate profile and to shoot RAW with certain fixed settings for each type of lighting to use custom profiles (there are several examples in the links of the changes in the appearance of the color chart before/after profiling). This is probably why most people talk about camera profiles in the context of fixed studio lighting.

In all of this reading I didn't see anything about profiling jpegs. Given that there is a lot of automatic (and uncontrolled) processing in the camera involved in the creation of each jpeg, I wonder if it is even possible to create a profile that works consistently on all jpeg images.

That's why printing photos at home is going to be big in near future the only problem I see is that color management required to get the colors right is intentionally or not but too hard than it suppose to be.

Printing at home is very expensive if you use OEM inks - it only makes sense to me if you can use 3rd party ink (and that is becoming more and more difficult as each new generation of printers is introduced). At OEM ink prices, it if far less expensive to print at a place like Costco.

Color management may not be easy to grasp and may seem to be overly complicated, but every bit of it is necessary to get consistently good colors on your finished prints.