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ezprint profile question
MichaelKirk
Registered Users Posts: 427 Major grins
I have never done any actual print proofing or used the ezprint profile as all my photos in the past have come out extremely nice.
BUT I just switched to new software (CS3 and Lightroom) and reading thru some new threads I see there is a new release of the ezprints profile - so I dowloaded it and was checking it out. Please note I did read thru all the threads discussing the profile (just a few) and really do not understand what exactly it means if the profile is different from my monitor print.
I do understand that my print will print closer to the "profile", but I guess my question is - how do I make my photo match exactly to the "Profile" print?
I did a few photo comparison (on original and unedited photos) and what I saw was generally the very brightest highlight bright colors tended to get a bit darker using the preview profile. Say someone with a bright colored shirt and a small portion of that shirt was at the high end of the brightness spectrum - this small section of the shirt would tend to loose the highlight and be darkened just a bit. Same with any bright colors - reds, yellows, orange, blue - just if a small portion of the colors were close to being blown out (not quite though) - the profile would darken these small areas - The profile effected about 1% if not less of the entire picture.
My monitor is not calibrated so does this mean my monitor is overly brightening these small highlighted areas of color and the ezprint profile is showing the actual? Calibrating my monitor would corrent this I would assume?
I guess working in CS3 the best way to be working on photos for print is to leave the Custom Color Proof left on the ezprints profile and set "View, proof colors, on"?
Thanks
Michael
BUT I just switched to new software (CS3 and Lightroom) and reading thru some new threads I see there is a new release of the ezprints profile - so I dowloaded it and was checking it out. Please note I did read thru all the threads discussing the profile (just a few) and really do not understand what exactly it means if the profile is different from my monitor print.
I do understand that my print will print closer to the "profile", but I guess my question is - how do I make my photo match exactly to the "Profile" print?
I did a few photo comparison (on original and unedited photos) and what I saw was generally the very brightest highlight bright colors tended to get a bit darker using the preview profile. Say someone with a bright colored shirt and a small portion of that shirt was at the high end of the brightness spectrum - this small section of the shirt would tend to loose the highlight and be darkened just a bit. Same with any bright colors - reds, yellows, orange, blue - just if a small portion of the colors were close to being blown out (not quite though) - the profile would darken these small areas - The profile effected about 1% if not less of the entire picture.
My monitor is not calibrated so does this mean my monitor is overly brightening these small highlighted areas of color and the ezprint profile is showing the actual? Calibrating my monitor would corrent this I would assume?
I guess working in CS3 the best way to be working on photos for print is to leave the Custom Color Proof left on the ezprints profile and set "View, proof colors, on"?
Thanks
Michael
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When you see colors shift in a soft proof with the new EzPrints profile, that is because your images contain some colors that the EzPrints printers are not capable of printing. The soft proof with the proper profile is attempting to show you a simulation of how the EzPrints printing software will modify the colors in your image in order to fit into the color gamut that their printers do support. If the result you see still looks good to you, then you're fine. Bright colored objects are a common thing that is hard for some printers to print.
This is nothing you are doing wrong on your monitor that is causing this unless you are brightening your images too much. If you aren't doing that, then these are just colors that occur in nature and you captured in your camera that happen to be beyond what the EzPrints printers can produce.
The printing software is fairly sophisticated and it tries to modify your overall colors in a way that changes the out of gamut colors into something that they can print, but does so in a way that the change blends with the surrounding colors. In many cases, you would never even know the difference with looking for it in a side to side comparison.
If you don't have a calibrated display (which it sounds like you don't), then you are leaving it a bit to chance on whether your display is relatively close to proper or not. If your display was off, then you might adjust a portrait to have a very pleasing skin tone on your monitor, send the print off to be printed and find a very different result came back from the printer. In this case, it had nothing to do with soft proofing, ICC profiles, printer capabilities or color gamut limitations. Instead, it was just because your monitor wasn't showing you correct color so when you adjusted your image to something you like on your monitor, that was setting color values in your image that are not actually pleasing on a properly calibrated device (such as a commercial printer) so when they print it on a calibrated device, you don't get the result you are expecting. Some people's monitors are "close-enough" and they get results they are happy with without calibrating their display, many are not. I highly recommend people get one of the hardware products that can calibrate/profile your display.
I personally don't leave soft proof on all the time. If printing, I have a step in my workflow where I check the colors in soft proofing and may actually work on the colors a bit to make sure I'm happy with it. If it's a normal image, I usually do this near the end of working with this image. If it's an image that I recognize as having challenging colors to print from the beginning, I may do that early in my workflow.
So, what should you do if you see colors that are out of gamut of the printer? That depends. If you are still OK with how the soft proof looks even though the colors have been modify to fit, you can just let it go and let the printer software fix up the colors to fit. If you want to control the process yourself, then you have to modify the colors to fit. I just did this recently on some images of a soccer team wearing bright red uniforms. For those images, I could reduce the saturation and luminance of the reds slightly and they would then fit into the EzPrints profile.
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Michael didn't say anything about a color shift. Lets' not use that term unless its really happening which is possible and means there's something not too kosher with the profile. Blues can shift magenta or cyan, not ideal of course. Michael seems to be talking about what we expect to see from soft proofing, colors that alter tone or perhaps saturation (use whatever terms you want, but color shift implies something bad).
You can't. Not exactly. But what you want to do is open an image you wish to print using the profile. Now duplicate that image. On the original, load the soft proof and make the two views from both documents the same size and zoom. Now you have a 'before and after' to view. You have to duplicate the image because with a new view, as you edit one, the other would update. That's not what we want.
Once the soft proof is one, that is the image you will adjust while viewing the other. Usually very minor tweaking is all that's needed (or possible). A slight curve adjustment followed by a slight saturation adjustment, maybe, maybe a tiny selective color tweak. Do this ALL on Adjustment layers. You can eventually make a layer set to contain them, name it for the output device. You could make multiple sets for multiple output needs if you're going to reprint the image over and over (naturally, only have ONE set on).
Ideally you use the profile you used to soft proof to convert the data into the print space, save off a flattened copy and get your print done.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
"Once the soft proof is one, that is the image you will adjust while viewing the other. Usually very minor tweaking is all that's needed (or possible). A slight curve adjustment followed by a slight saturation adjustment, maybe, maybe a tiny selective color tweak. Do this ALL on Adjustment layers. You can eventually make a layer set to contain them, name it for the output device. You could make multiple sets for multiple output needs if you're going to reprint the image over and over (naturally, only have ONE set on).
Ideally you use the profile you used to soft proof to convert the data into the print space, save off a flattened copy and get your print done."
I think I understand the workflow - edit the image, open a duplicate copy and turn on soft proof on the duplicate, edit the duplicate until it looks enough like the original edited image. At this point, since I work in sRGB, do I convert the edited duplicate image to the EZprints (for example) profile, or do I just save my duplicate image since it is already in sRGB?
Thanks for help or other suggestions.
If you have one image open, you can make a new view but as you edit the document, both update.
In this case, we want to edit one image while viewing it without edits. So we duplicate the document. Which becomes the "before" and which the "after" doesn't matter. One gets the adjustment layers as you view it AND the other copy. One you'll save off with the adjustments as the iteration you will output.
So, pick one of the documents, load the soft proof and edit on adjustment layers while viewing the original. They will never be identical but with some minor tweaks, you can get them much closer. This is of course image dependent. Some will require no editing, others more.
As to the final color space, that depends on the lab. I find it silly to supply a profile that is supposed to define the printing device and not use it to convert the data. But if you have such a lab, you'll have to send them sRGB but the edits are baked into this copy with the soft proof in mind.
Now the question becomes, did the profile they supplied, the one you used to edit based on the soft proof really define how the printer will print the image? Will it match? I can't answer that.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Thanks everyone for the info. The color vatiation is ever so slight between my image and using the new ezprints profile that it is almost not even noticable at time. I have to turn it on and off several times to actually find where the images is changing....so it is not that big of an issue.
I just ordered a few prints to check them against my viewed image just to make sure it is nothing drastic, plus since I am now working with new software (Lightroom and CS3) I also wanted to see how my images look using a new workflow and output.
Michael