Untitled Document

A friend of mine photographs paintings for artists. A couple or days ago he showed me a photograph of a painting with a wide swath of red (231-7-22) through it, 3 inches by 9 inches on a letter size print. When he soft proofed it with Epson's premium lustre profile the red changed to a very dull coral and when actually printed on Epson Premium Lustre paper, the red matched the soft proof.

No amount of adjustments he or I applied could come close to matching the screen colour of the red with the soft proof or the print.

I re-created the colour on my PC at home - my friend is on a Mac - and as expected the red on the screen differed from the soft proof, but not anywhere near as much as on my friend's Mac, and I was, by using selective colour, to get a red that was acceptable in tone, if just slightly darker, in my soft proof and print. We both print with an Epson 2200.

Does anyone have suggestions as to what is going on here? My monitor is calibrated with a spyder, my friend's with adobe gamma, which could be the problem but if it is, why did his soft proof match his print?

His profiles are the latest from Epson as are mine. Both of us use similar CRT monitors.

Regards,

John Denniston

www.dennistonphoto.com

www.dirtbikephoto.com

________________________________________________________________________

This problem is normal. I've had it in spades with photographs I made in Bangkok's Chinatown, where there is an abundance of bright saturated red. From all the research and enquiries I have made about this problem, the colour is out-of-gamut and you are seeing the results of gamut compression. I have found three ways of handling this issue, none of them 100% satisfactory: (1) change the Rendering Intent and see which intent provides a more satisfactory gamut compression compromise for the reds and the other colours too; (2) If you are in a very wide gamut workspace such as ProPhoto, trim down to AdobeRGB(98) or sRGB and see what that does; (3) as you have done, use a Selective Colour Adjustment Layer, reducing Cyan (which forces more red), increasing Yellow (which warms the red tone from the otherwise cyanish cast the softproof shows) and sometimes, adjusting Black up or down a bit to taste. You can do all of these in permutations or combinations. Do it with Soft Proof active so you see the monitor rendition of the to-be-printed result in real time.

Mark Segal

___________________________________________________________________________

On 7/10/06 7:08 PM, "John Denniston" wrote:

Out of gamut. The Epson1s don1t do all that well with real, saturated pure reds. When I profile them and compare them to my Fuji Pictrography (a true CMY device that exposes sliver media with lasers), I get a significantly purer Red which is the nature of this beast. I didn1t really notice this until I compared the same file output to these two radically different printers.

Andrew Rodney

___________________________________________________________________________

For kicks, did you try NOT using color management through Photoshop, setting the Epson color to Photo-Realistic or Vivid? If super-saturated colors are more important in a scene, such as one with no "real" colors, then "managing" the color might be self-defeating in a way.

Henry Davis

___________________________________________________________________________

We actually managed an acceptable print from my friends computer by using a glossy Epson profile with some Moab matte paper but I will pass along your idea to him as it might offer a greater degree of predictability.

What seems to be missing in the replies so far is an answer to what really concerns me about this problem, that I was able to get an acceptable print from my computer by adjusting the colour on the soft proof but neither me or my friend were able to come even close to getting an acceptable print from his computer except by using an incorrect profile and that print in no way matched the soft proof.

Regards,

John Denniston

www.dennistonphoto.com

www.dirtbikephoto.com

___________________________________________________________________________

It sounds to me like a colour management or inconsistent settings problem on one or the other computer system. The same image with the same file numbers should look pretty much the same on a print from both your systems if colour management is correct on both and the various print settings are the same.

Mark Segal

___________________________________________________________________________

It may be that your soft proof situation is better. Your monitor may be calibrated and profiled, and while you might not get the saturated colors that you would like, you can at least get something that is acceptable and looks more like your monitor. I was suggesting earlier that a limitation is imposed by the media profile that might be compressing the vivid colors, while all along, the printer can make some pretty vivid colors without color management.

That an incorrect profile got better results on your friends machine, is a clue. If his monitor is calibrated and profiled and the color setup in Photoshop is correct, at least the soft proof using the proper printer profile should be fairly close. Also double check that when sending the file to the printer with his machine that there is no color managing happening on top of Photoshop via the printer driver.

Henry Davis

___________________________________________________________________________

John, in your original post you mention that you re-created the colour on your PC at home. I suspect that may be the source of the discrepancy in results. Your friend was printing from a scanned photograph, right? In order to reproduce the same results on your machine I think you should try printing the same file (or a section of the file containing the red).

Best,

Dolores