End to End Color Management

[jerryschwartznb]

I've gotten myself all twisted around, and I need a rescue.

I understand many of the aspects of color management: gamut, color space, profiles, calibration, and most of the accompanying pieces. The problem is that I don't understand the inter-relationships of the various steps between taking a photo and printing it.

My equipment is not wonderful. If I were serious, I would have spent 10x what I did; but I'm not a pro. I'll settle for the best I can squeeze out of it. My goal, at this point, is to get my prints to look like what's on the screen.

For software I am using PSP X6 and Windows 8.1.

• The photos I get come from various sources. As I understand it, those images (primarily JPEG if they come from a camera, presumably RAW if I scan directly into PSP) should have the profile of the capturing device embedded in them. Is that correct?
• In the past I've been told that I should always use the color management in my editing application, rather than whatever Windows makes available. Is that still true? So far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off Windows Color Management (WCS).
• You can turn off color management in PSP. There is a checkbox for it.
• I've been reading that I should set my PSP color working space to sRGB. Is that turned on and off by the color management checkbox? Assuming I have a profile for my capture device (camera or scanner), should I use that profile instead?
• I have factory supplied profiles for both my monitor and my printer. Supposedly the printer will automatically select one of its various profiles based upon the paper I use, but that's a setting in WCS. (I can force a particular profile if I want.) In PSP's color management, I have to pick the profile manually.
• Should I turn off color management in PSP, and set everything up in WCS?
• WCS has a setting for viewing conditions. The default is "WCS profile for sRGB viewing conditions", the alternative is "WCS profile for ICC viewing conditions". Does that mean that I could (or should) get an ICC profile based upon my work area's lighting, etc.? How would I do that?

I hope someone is still paying attention.

Thanks to anyone who can help, or who can refer me to a cogent discussion of this on the web. I've read everything that's on the Microsoft sites, but while that's very good at explaining "what" I didn't get much on "how" or "why".

[brucet]

I'll make a comment here before all the experts have their say.

Colour management is 'almost' an impossible task to get 100% correct. There are so many variables. Such as room lighting. Time of day. And settings. These all affect how your monitor looks. Then there are all the variable with the printer. Ink type. Paper types. Printer profiles. Then there is your editing software. How good is the colour management in the software? How good is the colour management in your camera? Then there is the printing its self. What controls the printing. The editing software or dedicated software such as Qimage. Are you using the same colour space? White balance?
Then, and I believe the big question, is where is the print going to be displayed? Dark room? By a window. Displayed using sun light during the day and electric by night?
Oh and then there's the fact that your monitor is back lit while your print is reflective.

Sorry I haven't answered any of your questions. But my point is that colour management, IMHO, is a 'near enough is good enough' thing. Do not get paranoid about it.

Here's my solution. Calibrate, somehow, your monitor the best you can. Make sure it's not too bright. Turn colour management OFF in PSPx6. Get the profiles for the ink, printer, paper combinations. You can find these on the web. Then use a program such as Qimage to manage the printing. That's what I do. I get as near perfect a print as is reasonable to expect. Well for me they are 'near' perfect. And there's the crunch. You have to get it right only to please you.

Good luck. Don't stress.

Bruce

[jerryschwartznb]

Thanks for your advice. I was particularly interested in your suggestion to turn color management off in PSP.

I've been running around in circles. I have exactly what I want on the screen, but I can't get it to print properly. When I say "properly", I mean so it won't frighten the horses and make the ladies faint. A white dress shouldn't have yellow banding, a grey suit shouldn't look greenish-blue, and so forth. I understand the limitations of my equipment, and of end-to-end color matching in general, but it should be able to do better than that.

Here's what I just tried:

• I turned off color management in PSP
• Since PSP was no longer applying the monitor profile, I had to tinker with the image to get it looking right on the screen
• In WCS, I set the printer to automatically select a profile based upon the paper I use.

I did wind up with a reasonable facsimile of what's on the screen.

I don't know anything about Qimage, but the folks at Canon told me to use their Easy-PhotoPrint. It did, in fact, do a decent job; but it has a raft of settings of its own. (If they can standardize color spaces, why can't they standardize the terminology used to manipulate them?) I guess I can use Easy the way you use Qimage.

[jerryschwartznb]

[Sorry for the double post, something hiccoughed.

[brucet]

Canon would say that Canon products are the best!!! Download the trial of Qimage. http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u/index.html . Read their instructions carefully and see how you go. Keep in mind that output can be very subjective. Qimage allows you to 'soft proof' before printing. They also have a great help forum. http://ddisoftware.com/tech/index.php

PSP is an excellent product but is does have its limits. Colour management is one of them. Qimage takes over the colour management for printing. "Simply' select the paper type in your printer menu and a paper profile in Qimage and let it do the rest.

Good luck.

[jerryschwartznb]

Santa brought me, in addition to my usual lump of coal and Chanukah candles, a bit of insight. I realized that the weak link in this whole business is the calibration of my monitor.

The printer software does allow for all kinds of twiddling, but it shouldn't require it. Given a matched combination of profile, ink, and paper, it should do the right thing (within its physical limits). I should be able to put that aside.

The monitor comes with a factory-supplied profile, which is a wide gamut profile, but it isn't clear what monitor settings it applies to.

As you mentioned, ambient conditions can affect my perception of what's on the screen (although I suspect less so than with a CRT). The monitor also comes with a number of "presets", which affect the color but not the brightness or contrast. Unfortunately, none of these profiles is labeled "normal", or "works with factory profile". They have names like "Desktop", "Multimedia", and the like. The only ones that come close to meaningful are "sRGB" and "Custom (RGB)". There is also a generalized choice of gamma: PC or Mac. I know about that issue.

There is only one "Reset" option that affects what you see on the screen, and that resets the monitor to its original factory settings:

• Contrast and brightness are both set to 50%.
• The preset mode "Desktop" is chosen.

So, does that preset "go with" the factory-supplied profile? I have no idea.

I've tried creating my own profile. WCS warns me not to do this, because the factory-supplied profile is wide-gamut and any profile created by WCS will distort the colors. That part is easy to understand, so I don't use WCS to create a profile.

I've also tried creating a profile using using PSP. I have no idea if this would be a wide-gamut profile or not. It is obvious that in the process of creating a custom profile I have to turn off all of the presets and use the monitor's "It's all on you" setting.

Unfortunately, the ranges of contrast and brightness don't let me quite get to the complete range of greys. I can get the white end of the scale right, but the dark side isn't dark enough. That's what I get for not coughing up the money for an EIZO monitor; but then again, I get to live indoors and eat something other than canned beans.

So let's assume that I have made the best calibrated monitor profile that I can. That gets me back to my original question:

• Do I turn on color management in PSP, and apply the profiles there?
• If I do that, should I turn off the "use my settings" in WCS?
• Do I turn off color management in PSP and turn on "use my settings" in WCS?

Once I understand that, I can start thinking about what the rendering intent settings in WCS mean, and how WCS knows whether I'm printing a photo or a chart. Presumably that's something that the an application would indicate, and I've read that MS Office was the first (and perhaps only) one to do so.

[brucet]

OK I'm not an expert but here's my 2 cents worth. All I know is that I get, on papper, what I 'almost' see on my monitor.

First turn OFF colour management in PSP.
If I were you I would then use the WSC. That's what I have done. Save a the setting as a monitor profile. Ensure the brightness is way low. I have a Dell 2209wa and I have my brightness set at 7 on a scale of 0 to 100!! But your eye is the best tool you have.
Download the trial of Qimage. In Qimage set the setting for Qimage to control colour management. Quimage will find the monitor profiles. Select the one WSC has made for you. Open the printer dialogue box and turn OFF its colour management and set the paper type.

Your set to go.

Don't over think. Don't expect perfection. IMHO as long as your colours are as correct as possible use the brightness control on you monitor to adjust the print to monitor comparison.
My monitor is near a window. Morning sun shines in. Even with heavy curtains I can't edit in the mornings. Unless you work in a well lit cave you will never get 100% consistency.

Good luck.

[jerryschwartznb]

Again, thanks.

As a matter of fact, my work area is pretty close to a well-lit cave.

I also have a Dell monitor, a 2408WFP. There are two reasons I'm obsessing about this: my wife, who is in the picture, knows what everything should look like; and I'm the kind of person who will kill good in the pursuit of excellence.

My wife has said that, in general, my prints are so bad she won't bring them into work anymore. Everybody comments on how "off" the flesh tones are.

I think I'm going to start over again, step by step, beginning with setting the monitor to factory condition and using its factory supplied profile.

[MarkZ]

Another option in the quest for perfect colour is to use a monitor calibration tool such as Spyder. I went that route because I submit photos in the camera club and wanted them to appear on my monitor as close as possible to what is projected at the club. Their equipment is calibrated. I don't print but I think it is a complicated route (such as soft proofing to match ink and paper) to the final product as discussed in the earlier posts.

[jerryschwartznb]

I've thought about getting a calibration tool, but as you said it really wouldn't get me any closer to printing what I see on the screen.

For now, I don't care if my monitor is showing sky blue pink as long as the same thing comes out on paper.

I remember that many years ago I tried scanning a known good color chart, displaying it on my monitor, and then printing it. The idea was that you would then scan the printout and keep tweaking until what you put into the scanner was what you saw on the screen, and what you saw on the screen is what came out of the printer.

The results were indifferent, but then again we're talking about the early days. I thought about trying it now, but the thought of introducing a scanner into the mix is rather off-putting.

[jerryschwartznb]

Okay, here's where things stand now:

I decided to chuck the whole automatic thing and fiddle with various settings by eye and hand in the printer driver. This actually gave me better luck that I'd had before, but I was spending a year's allowance on ink and paper. I was using the wife-o-meter as a calibration tool; but it seemed the closer I got my grey suit to looking grey, the redder people's faces were getting. She was concentrating on the flesh tones; I was concentrating on the clothing.

So I decided to chuck the whole thing yet again and start over. I reset my Dell 2408WFP (a wide gamut monitor) to its factory settings. It was like looking into the sun. I set WCS for the monitor to the factory supplied profile (a wide gamut profile). I set the WCS printer profile to "automatic", which is supposed to automatically choose the profile based upon the paper type.

In PSP, I set the color space to the monitor's profile and turned off color management. I don't know if the color space matters with color management turned off, but it shouldn't do any harm.

I printed the picture, and returned my attention to the monitor. I backed down the brightness to 0, which seems to be the generally accepted setting; and I backed down the contrast to 39. Then, to fix the flesh tones, I dialed back the red to 90; and to fix a few other things, I turned the green down to 96.

At this point, the image on the screen and the printed image look pretty similar. The printed picture is a little more saturated, and a little bit darker. People's face's look pretty much okay: the groom and his father are distinctly lighter skinned than anyone else, my wife's ex-husband looks a bit florid (as he did in real life). My daughter's gown looks very close, which is tough because it wasn't quite white and it was very sheer; but the white roses in her bouquet look white.

Even my silver tie looks good.

All in all, I think I've accomplished my goal: what I see on the screen is pretty close to what will print out. Now I have to wait for my wife to come home and get her verdict.