Understanding monitor/printer profiles?

Started 7 months ago | Discussions thread
Model Mike
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Re: Understanding monitor/printer profiles?
In reply to Jeff Peterman, 7 months ago

Jeff Peterman wrote1.
I shoot RAW files and open them in CS5 or LR4 with the sRGB profile/color space applied.

Hi Jeff,

Choose a working space which has as wide a gamut of colours as that expected by your lab. Most printing outfits expect images to be provided in "sRGB" (but see below), I think you can safely assume that this applies to Costco. sRGB is has a relatively small gamut of colours.

2. I can set my "working space" in Photoshop. Currently it is set to sRGB, but I could select the ASUS PA248 profile of my monitor.3. I've started sending my photos in highest quality JPG to Costco for printing. I can send them with the sRGB or Asus PA248 profiles applied (which appear almost identical on my monitor) or with the Costco printer profile (Noritsu 3411) applied (which makes the image look much worse on my monitor).

Set the working space to "sRGB". (You could set it to "Prophoto", which has a larger gamut of colours, but it would offer no real advantage as the final image you send to the lab will be sRGB.)

3. I've started sending my photos in highest quality JPG to Costco for printing. I can send them with the sRGB or Asus PA248 profiles applied (which appear almost identical on my monitor) or with the Costco printer profile (Noritsu 3411) applied (which makes the image look much worse on my monitor).

You should never 'apply' profiles, only 'convert' from one profile to another, and even this should only be necessary for special jobs. If you make your working space "sRGB" in Photoshop, then no further colour space conversion is required before generating the final JPEG.

4. When I send the photos for printing, I have them printed in "auto" mode, which lets them adjust the colors or "manual" mode, where the colors are not adjusted.

My questions are:
1. Am I correct in thinking that in CS5 I should edit my photos in the Asus PA248 color space to match my monitor, then apply the Noritsu 3411 color space and save then save the file specially for sending to Costco (ignoring the appearance on my monitor when this profile is applied? If I'm wrong, please let me know what I should be doing.

In theory you could if you wanted choose any colour space as your working space, as long as the gamut (i.e. richness) of the colour space was larger than the one required by your lab.

In practice however, there are three standard working spaces for RGB image editing, these being (in descending order of gamut size) Prophoto, Adobe RGB and sRGB.

2. How do I handle any of this in Lightroom?

In the Export dialog, choose sRGB as the output profile. Lightroom will silently convert the colour space of the image from Prophoto (the large-gamut working space) to sRGB when generating the JPEG

--
Mike
http://flickr.com/rc-soar

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