Skin Tones (Redux)

Thanks everyone! Tons to digest here!!! I need to go back over all of the responses with a fine-toothed comb, and start playing around and see what I come up with.

Just to clarify, the image looks fine on my monitor, but prints horribly.

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James

blacks, whites and grays all appear to be OK. The girl in the center has a very

good tan, the girl to her right looks to have a great complexion. The only problem is the overly pink of the girl to the tanned girl's left. For starters I think I would set up the printer to its default settings and go from there. gc

Doublehelix said:

Thanks everyone! Tons to digest here!!! I need to go back over all of the responses with a fine-toothed comb, and start playing around and see what I come up with.

Just to clarify, the image looks fine on my monitor, but prints horribly.

Click to expand...

Could you let us know how the edited versions (offered by posters here) print on the same printer? I'll appreciate some feedback...
Thanks

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Best Regards
Sunshine

ps If you see someone without a smile on, give him one of yours...

I use to have the same problem until I went into "properties" on the printer page. I changed some settings (standard instead of best) and some settings on the colors ( some minus and some plus). You just have to keep changing the settings until it matches your monitor. Now my prints match my monitor. I have an Epson Artison 810 and my pictures looks great. Hope this info can be of some use to you.

photogirl44 said:

I use to have the same problem until I went into "properties" on the printer page. I changed some settings (standard instead of best) and some settings on the colors ( some minus and some plus). You just have to keep changing the settings until it matches your monitor. Now my prints match my monitor. I have an Epson Artison 810 and my pictures looks great. Hope this info can be of some use to you.

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I also have an Epson Artisian 810! I will do some work today hopefully and post back.

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James

I spent some time working on the image today, taking into account a lot of Mike's suggestions (RetiredInFlorida) in the way of clean-up work (Great suggestions, thanks!), as well as all of the color adjustment corrects that were suggested by him, Sunshine Boy and others, and the image looks better to my eyes on my screen.

Then I also looked at the print settings in Lightroom and on the Printer Properties screen for the printer, and I see that had 2 color profiles fighting with each other. I had the ICC color profiles loaded correctly in LR, but the printer was also applying its own color correction, so I had the 2 of them battling it out for supremacy! I turned off the printer color management, and used the correct printer (Epson Artisian 810) and paper color profile in LR, and VOILA! Success!!! The image looks GREAT now thanks to everyone's help!!!

I ended up getting a lot of help in areas I did not expect (Thanks Mike!), and the overall improvement in the print is quite high.

I also printed Sunshine Boy's version, and it also prints perfectly, which is a combination of his color adjustments as well as getting the color profiles worked out between LR and the printer driver.

It seems like I spend a lot of time thanking folks for all of their help around here, and I have to say that I am once again indebted to the crew of the The Digital Darkroom for all of the help in this thread. You guys are the best!!!

CHEERS!!!

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James

glad to see all the tips people gave you helped

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Mike

and then use the correct printer profile to get accurate reproduction of your images.

Calibrize does a decent job, if you can't afford a hardware calibrator.

Doublehelix said:

I spent some time working on the image today, taking into account a lot of Mike's suggestions (RetiredInFlorida) in the way of clean-up work (Great suggestions, thanks!), as well as all of the color adjustment corrects that were suggested by him, Sunshine Boy and others, and the image looks better to my eyes on my screen.

Then I also looked at the print settings in Lightroom and on the Printer Properties screen for the printer, and I see that had 2 color profiles fighting with each other. I had the ICC color profiles loaded correctly in LR, but the printer was also applying its own color correction, so I had the 2 of them battling it out for supremacy! I turned off the printer color management, and used the correct printer (Epson Artisian 810) and paper color profile in LR, and VOILA! Success!!! The image looks GREAT now thanks to everyone's help!!!

I ended up getting a lot of help in areas I did not expect (Thanks Mike!), and the overall improvement in the print is quite high.

I also printed Sunshine Boy's version, and it also prints perfectly, which is a combination of his color adjustments as well as getting the color profiles worked out between LR and the printer driver.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback and I am so glad that it all worked out well in the end.

Look after the girls...

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Best Regards
Sunshine

ps If you see someone without a smile on, give him one of yours...

Glad everything worked out.

Thanks, I do plan on getting the monitor calibrated, and I am sure it would help a lot.

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James

In a previous post I recommended the use of the ColorThink Pro or similar program to determine if you printing problems might be a gamut issue.

So I graphed your original posting to share the results with you.

I used the Canon Pro 9000 markII with Canon's Pro Platinum paper combination. The best combination I have for a photo with as many bright colors that your file contains.

I adjusted the background and color space to black so that only the out of gamut colors are displayed.

The first display shows the colors at the dark end of the spectrum that are out of gamut.
This would probably indicate your dark skin tone problem.

The second display shows the highlight or bright end of the spectrum that is out of gamut.

The last two displays are some specifications for the Canon profile and for comparison the sRGB profile.

As you can see it would seem that your file needs to be manipulated quite a bit before anyone can place blame on the monitor/printer combination.

Thanks Tom...

I am very interested in this (I am a bit of a techie), but I am not sure I understand or can interpret what I am seeing. I'll try to do some research on this, but can you give me the 50,000 foot view of what this program is actually doing?

You talk about "out of gamut" colors. What does this mean, "out of gamut"?

Honestly, I am not sure what the data is showing me, and how I can use it to help get better printing images. How can I interpret what it is showing me?

Thanks for doing this, and for opening up a new opportunity for me to improve the quality of my printed images, and to waste less paper and ink.

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James

From the PCmag encyclopedia:

Definition of: color gamut

The entire range of colors available on a particular device such as a monitor or printer. A monitor, which displays RGB signals, typically has a greater color gamut than a printer, which uses CMYK inks. When a color is "out of gamut," it cannot be properly converted to the target device; for example, to a different type of printer. See color management system and color space.

What I was trying to demonstrate is that your monitor, calibrated or not but within reasonable specifications, will sometimes show you colors (accurate or not) that cannot be duplicated on your printer,ink,paper combination. Many times we are discussing colors that also cannot be displayed on most standard (sRGB) monitors.

What the graphs, I provided, show are the colors that basically cannot be replicated on my Canon Pro 9000 MKII printer on Canon's Premium Glossy paper. I chose the glossy paper because it has the largest gamut available to me.

If I wanted to print this, I would have to adjust the colors so that they all (or most) fell into the printer,ink,paper gamut. In other words the graphs would be completely black, no colors would unprintable.

Photoshop has a gamut warning device that you can activate, but I have found it not to be as accurate as I need.

I hope this clears up some of your questions.

To give you an idea of some the problems involved with using a monitor to visually judge printer output I've included graphs plotting your original post against a standard sRGB profile. This indicates that there are colors that we are trying to judge that cannot be displayed on standard sRGB monitors.

We would be attempting to adjust colors that we cannot see !

Once again the top display shows the dark colors that cannot be accurately displayed.

The second display shows the highlight colors that cannot be accurately displayed.

The differences are not as great as the printer displays, but are still considerable.

I didnt read through everyones posts here but I can see that your edited version looks like sun burned skin on my monitor and would print that way too. I re-toned the skin and results are here. Try printing this and give some feedback.

Doublehelix said:

Any help would be greatly appreciated.





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James

Click to expand...

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Only when you can criticize yourself, should you criticize others. Mikes.

Tom:

Wow! Thank you so much for that, it makes a lot of sense, and now I have a feel for what is going on. I will do some more research into this. I really appreciate all of your efforts.

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James

Your welcome.

What is sometimes a lot of fun is when in a camera specific forum the discussion centers around how wonderful a camera renders colors and how superior it is to a different brand. When the bragging gets to be too much, I'll download the photo that is being shown as an example and see that it blows the sRGB color space apart with more colors out of gamut than in. But to be fair I realize that there are 3-4,000 dollar professional monitors that are calibrated with 1-2,000 dollar calibration systems. So I'll compare the photo to Adobe RGB ( a much larger colorspace) and some of the colors are still not within the larger gamut.

So it seems that the group is praising distortions that are visible and not. This seems to happen more and more and its probably because no one prints as much.

By the way I don't normally point out the flaws in the various assessments, I try not to be mean spirited .

Doublehelix said:

old jim said:

They are so beautiful why not take the spots off the girl in the middle?

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Thank you, they are beautiful! And personally, I think they are beautiful just the way they are!

They are teenage girls posing at their prom, not models. Just because we can, doesn't always mean we should. If these were paid-for senior portraits, I could cross that bridge and ask them if they would like me to do some additional touch up work, but this is just a quick candid between 3 best friends.

At this age, everything is a self confidence issue, and by removing too much in the way of "spots", we emphasize something that is perceived as being "bad" or wrong. Remember, this is a candid not a portrait.

Acne is a different issue however, and I have no problem getting rid of blemishes.

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James

Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my impulsive suggestion :-( Most of the folks I'm shooting lately are closer to my age, and they want to look younger. I remove a lot of stuff and they love it. Younger ladies might indeed take it as disapproval of their appearance. I'll need to be careful not to offend. Again Thanks!

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DP Review - Where else?



Old Jim ;-)

old jim said:

Thank you for your thoughtful reply to my impulsive suggestion :-( Most of the folks I'm shooting lately are closer to my age, and they want to look younger. I remove a lot of stuff and they love it. Younger ladies might indeed take it as disapproval of their appearance. I'll need to be careful not to offend. Again Thanks!

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No offense taken! Thanks for your reply.

All the best, heck, with a name like "Jim", you gotta be a good guy, right???

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James