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Smugmug Print Questions
PB Media
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On smugmug, I read about the different ppi's for the different printers. Besides changing that, should I adjust the size for the print size (ie: 8x12), or just leave it at original size?
I downloaded the ez prints icc profile and viewed a photo with it, and it lacks contrast. Do I view it with the profile and correct the image, so it's right with that profile, or embed it? In Assign profile, I saw the difference from Adobe RGB to ezprints. In convert to profile, I didn't see a difference? Is that because it adjusted it to look the same?
Lastly, on the Print part of the help section on Smugmug, it said in the bleed/trim part, "How much? If the mechanical trimmer were perfectly accurate and consistent (it isn't) adding 38 pixels to the total width of your image would work. EZprints recommends you allow .25 inches (75 pixels) on an 8x10 print to fully allow for worst cases."
Is that 38px to each side, or 19px to each side?
Thanks for any help.
I downloaded the ez prints icc profile and viewed a photo with it, and it lacks contrast. Do I view it with the profile and correct the image, so it's right with that profile, or embed it? In Assign profile, I saw the difference from Adobe RGB to ezprints. In convert to profile, I didn't see a difference? Is that because it adjusted it to look the same?
Lastly, on the Print part of the help section on Smugmug, it said in the bleed/trim part, "How much? If the mechanical trimmer were perfectly accurate and consistent (it isn't) adding 38 pixels to the total width of your image would work. EZprints recommends you allow .25 inches (75 pixels) on an 8x10 print to fully allow for worst cases."
Is that 38px to each side, or 19px to each side?
Thanks for any help.
my smugmug: PB media
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You should use the ezprints profile to "soft proof" in Photoshop. You should not assign it or convert to that profile. Your document on Smugmug and printed through Ezprints needs to be sRGB so make sure that is what your document is converted to.
The EzPrints profile is provided so you can use Photoshop's soft proofing capabilities to preview how your document will look when printed on EzPrint's printers. If your document contains extreme colors (like brilliant reds or greens), then you will probably see some color shift when you soft proof because many printers are not capable of printing those colors. If your document does not contain colors beyond the capabilities of their printers, you should not see significant color shifts when soft proofing.
The labeled ppi and labeled document size does not matter at all to Smugmug or to EzPrints. All that matters is how many pixels your image has and how good a quality those pixels are. When preparing images for Smugmug, I never even pay one second of attention to the labeled ppi or labeled size. Those are just metatag labels on the image and are not used by either Smugmug or EzPrints.
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To soft proof, do I just look at the difference between the current colors (image is sRGB) and colors with ezprints.icc checking/unchecking 'preview' in assign profile?
Do you add blank space on the sides, to make sure things don't get cutoff?
Eeek. No, never use "assign profile" in this way. Assign profile has little to do with soft proofing and the result you see has nothing to do with how the document will print.
I'd suggest you read this document on soft proofing. It's written by Andrew Rodney, a color management professional who posts here at dgrin from time to time.
And then, a few other articles that discuss how to set up and use soft proofing:
http://ezprints.mye-pix.com/help/IccProfileHelp.asp
http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-color
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/profiles.htm
http://www.udel.edu/cookbook/scan-print/softproof/softproof.html
When I'm soft proofing, I first make sure I have the proper print/paper profile installed into the computer so it's available for use in Photoshop (it will show up in the profile picker list).
Then, I set it as the profile I want to use for proofing in View/Proof Setup/Custom.
Then, I do View/Gamut Warning. This shows you to places in your image where the printer cannot product the color you have in your image. If it's only small areas, I don't worry about it here. If it's large areas, then I know that I will probably want to target some sort of adjustments to bring those colors into range.
Then, I do View/Proof Colors. This attempts to show you how the image will look when it's printed. It can't be perfect because the screen isn't guaranteed to have the same output capabilities as your printer/paper and it's obviously a software-based simulation, but it can't hurt to see how it looks here. If your image is generally within the limits of what the printer can produce, you shouldn't see large shifts when you proof colors. If you have lots of colors outside the gamut of your printer, those will definitely get shifted in this view.
I don't know of any printer that can print all of AdobeRGB. Many printers can't even print all of the smaller sRGB. Some can't print all of sRGB, but can print some of the extended colors in AdobeRGB. It all varies by printer, by paper and by print lab.
EzPrints only accepts sRGB files for input so there is no way (at least that I'm aware of through Smugmug) to even attempt to print colors beyond sRGB. I know from examination of the EzPrints ICC profile that it says they can't print really deep reds and certain bright greens (I had deep red in some soccer uniforms), though when I ran some test prints, their conversion of my images into what they could print did a pretty good job. I could manually tweak it a little better than their automated process could do because I knew what objective I was trying to achieve, but their automated process did a pretty darn good. Most people wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
Many home printers and some other printer services can benefit from some of the extended colors in AdobeRGB (if those are present in your images).
If you can't live with any of your image being trimmed off by the bleed area, then you have to add extra border and do your own trimming. I have ask several times myself for a bordered print that would give me my whole print with a white border around it, but they don't yet have such an offering.
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So..the ez prints profile is just for soft proofing and sRGB should be embedded for ez prints to print it?
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Andrew Rodney
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Yes, for ezprints printing through Smugmug, you just use their profiles for soft proofing in Photoshop. It's for seeing a simulation of what it will look like when printing and understanding the gamut and other capabilities of their printers.
The images themselves must be sent to ezprints as sRGB images. There are other printers that will let you send them images in other profiles (like AdobeRGB) if they are properly tagged or will let you actuall Convert the documents to their printer profile and send them that way. I don't think EzPrints allows that.
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I have no idea which rendering intent to use. Which do you use?
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Here's the soft proof tutorial: http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1123524.
and here's a closeup of the soft proof dialog: http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1123524/1/52306697/Large.
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That's not important. We have two vastly different kinds of color spaces (print and display based), they will never match up exactly. That there are lots of colors you can capture and edit that fall outside sRGB (and for that matter Adobe RGB (1998)) that CAN be printed that is important. IOW, that a printer output color space can't fully contain even sRGB isn't important. Its all the colors that DO exceed this space that are not getting printed that the printer could use. We're talking about putting round pegs in square holes; the shapes are vastly dissimilar. So we need big square holes using this analogy to fit everything we can capture.
If you look at simple matrix style profiles that are used for working spaces, those defined by a white point, gamma (TRC) and three primaries in a 3D plot, you’ll see they reach maximum saturation at high luminance levels. Then their gamut dramatically narrows at lower levels down to black. If you now compare an RGB LUT profile that is used to define printer spaces, you see the max saturation is at lower luminance levels. With an RGB color space, you have to make more saturation by adding light but on a printer you make more saturation by adding ink. So these differences make sense when you think about the two types of devices and their gamut plot. OK, with these RGB working spaces (Matrix type profiles), you need a wide enough gamut at lower luminance levels to hold the printer gamut's which have very wide primaries. The results are the need for a pretty large gamut working space, in some cases (like ProPhoto RGB), such that the some primaries are defined outside of human vision! Again, the only way to make such simple shaped color spaces larger is to extend the three RGB primaries. No such device produces this kind of color, these are synthetic color spaces defined using math alone (to define the location of the RGB primaries, the white point and the TRC). Print spaces are based on real world devices once we profile them. So, its once again the issue of fitting a round peg in a square hole.
Lastly is the issue of clipping important colors you hope to reproduce. Nearly any digital camera shooting Raw can capture data outside of Adobe RGB (1998) depending on the scene shot or course. Many dark greens and yellow colors fall into this camp. If you convert into Adobe RGB (1998), or worse, a smaller color space, those subtle gradations get clipped to a solid color or what appears now as a blob. So a larger gamut working space is more about containing more saturated colors. Its also about ensuring you maintain the dissimilarities between colors you captured and can output those distinctions between the colors.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/