Out of Gamut and what to do?

Cindy

Hi everyone,

I finally 'made' the time this morning to ask about this buggy color issue. Occasionally I run into 'Out of Gamut' colors. With portraits where the color is critical (clothing, etc) I'm not sure what to do... or the best ways to tackle it. For example in the photos below I 'knew' via softproofing in photoshop that the 'orange' was out of gamut and would be slightly off when printed... but how could I have fixed it? What adjustments & or steps do you'll take when faced with this issue? I normally have the most problems with oranges & reds... sometimes the schools bright bright blues.

I've downloaded smugmugs calibration print and note that even it shows out of gamut colors when softproofed, exspecially the orange reeses package which goes allmost completly grey. What's a gal to do???

Your advice will be greatly appriciated. My scalp and nerves will forever thank you.

edgework

Cindy wrote:

Hi everyone,

I finally 'made' the time this morning to ask about this buggy color issue. Occasionally I run into 'Out of Gamut' colors. With portraits where the color is critical (clothing, etc) I'm not sure what to do... or the best ways to tackle it. For example in the photos below I 'knew' via softproofing in photoshop that the 'orange' was out of gamut and would be slightly off when printed... but how could I have fixed it? What adjustments & or steps do you'll take when faced with this issue? I normally have the most problems with oranges & reds... sometimes the schools bright bright blues.

I've downloaded smugmugs calibration print and note that even it shows out of gamut colors when softproofed, exspecially the orange reeses package which goes allmost completly grey. What's a gal to do???

Your advice will be greatly appriciated. My scalp and nerves will forever thank you.

I can't think of any conversion that would cause a color to go neutral. Are you moving from your native RGB space to CMYK? What kind of printing envorinment?

Cindy

edgework wrote:

I can't think of any conversion that would cause a color to go neutral. Are you moving from your native RGB space to CMYK? What kind of printing envorinment?

By going grey I meant that when in photoshop I click to view the 'gamut warning' = which results in the gray warning over all the 'out of gamut' colors... the colors that won't print as seen. If I uncheck the gamut warning I can then see how they'll look when printed from smugmug -> ezprints. The orange in the pictures above do not actually print gray (go neutral) but what was once a bright pretty orange actually shows (via softproof and/or the actual prints) to be darker... kinda dingy or washed out. Sorry I didn't explain it better above.... hope this time round it made sense.

rutt

PP5E, Chapter 15 has a long attack at a shot with a very similar problem. If you have it, take a look. If not, maybe this discussion can be good practice for the reading group members.

Cindy

rutt wrote:

PP5E, Chapter 15 has a long attack at a shot with a very similar problem. If you have it, take a look. If not, maybe this discussion can be good practice for the reading group members.

I don't have the book yet but... looks like my timing with these troubles is about right. I just read in your link that someone is/was considering taking that chapter but won't because they find it the most frustrating in the entire book. Guess I'm not alone in my frustrations

I've been considering ordering these books for awhile now and jumping in the groups but I'm not sure where I'll find the time. I read in another thread someone recommends starting with lab... but I really wanted to jump into the one linked above. Why would lab be better? Does it really matter which book you start with? [I'd rather start with the right one, no need to add to my frustrations if it would]

I'm getting ready to start another job myself but maybe I'll order one of the books and join in as time allows. Sadly my new job is not photography related but it does provide excellent insurance for the family and right now that's high need & priority. I'n the meantime I'm working my tail off trying to cram learn as much as possible as quick as possible + tie up all the business loose ends (tidy the website, make sure all the paper work is caught up, forms are well within reach, etc.)

Thanks So Much. I'll be watching that thread.

gluwater

Andy to the rescue!

Out of Gamut fix

LuckyBob

The other thing that I like to do when I've got out of gamut colors (with my Epson 2200) is to turn on gamut warning and use the color picker to sample some of the problem colors. If you click on its swatch to bring up the color picker, there's a small color box with an exclamation above it - this is the closest in-gamut color. If you click on it you can compare it to what you picked out of the image and get a feel for what will be in and out of gamut, and by how much.

Sometimes it's not worth fixing since the in-gamut color is so close to what it should look like; the issue can be the printer's granularity from time to time. In other words, it can print super-saturated/super-bright/super-whatever colors, but not the exact color you're asking for, but the substitution is really close to correct anyway. Good luck

rutt

Cindy, were these originally shot in raw or jpeg? Would you be willing to make the originals available for practice with OOG techniques? Please?

Cindy

rutt wrote:

Cindy, were these originally shot in raw or jpeg? Would you be willing to make the originals available for practice with OOG techniques? Please?

Gluwater: Thanks for the Andy/Shay fix. I tried it on the above images but didn't like the results any better. Had to use to much to bring it in gamut. I'm certainly saving this tip to try on other similar problem images though.

Luckybob: I didn't know about the !closet color thing so I'll try that out later. I agree completly that 'sometimes' it's close enough so not worth worrying about.

Rutt: Sure you'll can use the files.
I shot in raw with sRGB color space. Not sure how or where I could upload raw??? Also saved my PSD files. The final images aren't much different from in camera setting.

Workflow: I shoot->trasfer w/ Nikon transfer -> Check raw in Nikon capture. (Allthough various other white balance, etc settings likely could have brought it in gamut... I liked it & the customer saw the raw files after the shoot and really liked these ones so proceeded).
Save as tif -> Open in CS2 -> run my handy dandy fast step by step action which works most of the time. I adjust settings and layer opacity as it runs. It inlcudes: Neat image plugin -> heal/clone if needed -> minor S-curve -> minor midtone up curve -> option to stop to adjust layers or continue -> save as PSD -> flatten, check softproof, (scream & stop the action if it's way off (scream louder when I loved what I had :cry and it's OoG) try for too long to bring it in gamut... finnally decide it's close enough)
USM -> jpeg -> Smugmug. And finnally to here.

I just checked the saved PSD and sure enough the bottom layer (origanal converted tif) is OoG also. Let me know where to put the files. Hopefully we can all learn

rutt

Cindy kindly made the raw versions available as examples for practice with OOG images. I have uploaded them to:

http://www.colortheory.us/cindy1.nef
http://www.colortheory.us/cindy1.nef

Let's see what we can do with these. To be really fair, take a trip to CMYK and back to jpeg at the end of your edit. That will make it a lot harder but will show off how well they will be able to print.

rutt

I think you'll find this in gamut for most any output device you care about:

1. Imported from ACR into ProPhoto RGB.
2. Converted into Dan's skeleton black CMYK:
   
3. At this point the image looks bad, but it's within any reasonable gamut.
4. Curves to use 100% yellow for some points on her top, push toward magenta instead of orange, and reestablish black point:
   
5. Convert to sRGB. This gets the version at the top of this post.

But I wanted to try to get better depth in her face, so:

• Duplicate in CMYK before converting to sRGB
• Make a green luminosity blend layer
• Use the Magenta channel as a layer mask for the blend. Blur and steepen to keep it off the sweater.

Someone else can probably do better, but I wanted the practice.

Sam

Ether this is really simple or I'm missing something. All I basically did was lower the saturation in the raw converter, and the only oog I had were a few wisps of stringy gray lines. Not enough that you would be able to see on any print smaller than 40” X 60” if then?

Sam

edgework

No complaint with anything you did, Rutt, but I think there's an additional element that should be considered prior to the kinds of moves you made.

This image is a perfect example of what happens when Photoshop converts an image to a space that can't accommodate all its colors. The default method, Relative Colormetric will create duplicate colors wherever possible; for the out of gamut colors, it crunches them at the edges of the range. As Dan points out, this is a problem far less than you would think, but in situations like this image, where the OOG colors also contribute crucial detail, it is a problem. The other method, Perceptual will recreate in the new space the relationship between all colors from the original, with a necessary shift in all colors, but with a noticable improvement in detail.

Note that in both cases, you abandon all hope of capturing the original OOG colors. The question is where do you trade off?

This is a straight CMYK conversion using Photoshop defaults. All of the light areas on the right side of the shirt, which provided shape and definition to the folds and contours of the cloth, have simply vanished. The face and background, however, and most of the left side of the shirt have converted to exact matches.

[img]http://idisk.mac.com/crawfordhart-Public/OOG colors/relative.jpg[/img]

This conversion uses Perceptual in the Color Settings, and the shirt shows a much better range of detail, though the whole thing is slightly darker.

[img]http://idisk.mac.com/crawfordhart-Public/OOG colors/perceptual.jpg[/img]

If you open each image and then drag one onto the other as a layer and toggle it on and off, the difference is striking.

Whether this should be an initial move, or the final step after making RGB and LAB moves, or simply one more aspect to take into consideration is open for discussion, but, since color moves are the name of the game anyway, preserving as much detail as possible seems to be a useful tactic.

I think I'd probably mask out the perceptual conversion and just paint back the areas of affected detail, leaving the rest to the standard color workflow, but each image calls for a different approach.

Of course, pulling channels from the RGB version, that contain detail, and luminosity blending them in CMYK can also be effective. Like I said, this isn't meant to replace anything that has already become part of the arsenal. It's just good to know.

pathfinder

Nice demonstration of the difference in Rendering Intents from Relative Colormetric to Perceptual.