colour profiles

[fielden]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I hope someone can help with this problem.

I am using Lightroom Classic CC on a new MacBook Pro and printing to an Epson SC P600

My problem is that the photo prints out darker than on my screen. I have now got myself in a fix over colour profiles in that Lightroom is operating in Prophoto colour space, The screen on my laptop is  set to colour LCD and I guess the printer is in some different colour space.  Is this my problem?

What should the monitor, Lightroom and printer be set to?

Confused

Graeme

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[Exodies]

Colour spaces are not your problem. Calibration of your screen is. Take one of your prints and compare it to the photo on your computer. Darken your screen (computer brightness control) until it matches the print. Now lighten the DNG (increase exposure or highlights, whites) until it is as bright as you want the print to be. It helps if you do this in normal print viewing light. A print made now should be ok.

[Jeff S]

Search “Why are my prints dark” and you’ll find loads of articles with reasons and tips for this common question.  

Most screens are too bright at default settings, and laptop screens typically lack the controls available with good desktop monitors.  

At the end of the day, a backlit screen has different characteristics than a print.  The idea is to get close without wasting paper, and this ideally requires a disciplined workflow....including soft proofing, calibration throughout, including display lighting (temp and brightness) control. Even glass over the final print can affect perceived brightness.

Jeff

 

 

[jaapv]

A dedicated screen calibration system (Datacolor Spyder or Color Munky) is not expensive and easy to use. It will improve your results considerably. Don't rely on the inbuilt MAC tools, they are close to useless.

Don't worry about Lightroom. It does process in Prophoto, but it will not display in it. The software will handle the colorspace  workflow automatically.

[adan]

As Exodies says, you have to set your computer screen brightness so its brightest whites are as "dark" as a piece of white paper set beside the screen. By dialing down your LCD brightness (in my case with a Mac Cinema display about 50% of full brightness), to edit pictures with daylight coming in the window onto the paper. And, where needed, by adjusting your ambient light on the paper (in your workspace) - open the window blinds, only work in daytime, add some really bright (ideally, daylight-balanced) room lighting for nightime editing/printing, etc. etc.

That is the only way to get prints the same brightness as what you see on-screen - make sure you are viewing the picture both on the screen and the print with equal brightnesses.

_____________________

As to color spaces, that applies only to the Working Space you choose in Lightroom - Adobe 1998 is the "preferred" colo(u)r space for LR or Photoshop and most other picture editing, unless you have a guaranteed reason to use something else. LR Preferences or some other menu item should let you change back from ProPhoto to Adobe 1998.

Profiles are similar to - but not identical to - color spaces. So don't mix them up - they do different things.

You should have a Profile for your computer screen, built either with Apple's built-in profiling software or with a third-party hardware device. For DIY with Apple's software, see: System Preferences > Displays > Color > Calibrate and go through the steps it asks for to set white point (yellower or bluer - default computer screens tend to be very blue), and gamma (a contrast curve) - and then save that profile with a name ("Graeme's Profile Dec. 2018" or some such). The default gamma setting is generally 2.2. The white point depends on various things, including how "yellow" your printing paper is. Usually somewhere between D5000 and D5500 K (degrees kelvin - a yellowish sunlight color).

(BTW - I am selling $1000 worth of prints per month using the "close to useless" built-in Mac calibration software. And the prints match the screen exactly (despite the limitations of printing pigments vs. glowing screen pixels)).

You should set up your Epson and LR printing controls/dialogue boxes so that 1) "Printer Color Management" is turned OFF (the printer sits down and shuts up, and lets LR have full control of the color data to print) and 2) then set up your LR printing preferences so that it can - in fact - accurately use that control. "Lightroom Manages Color" - ON.

That includes choosing a Printer/Paper Profile (and there should be a ton of Epson paper profiles already installed - they came with your Epson P600 software): E.G. - "SC P600 Series Premium Photo Paper Glossy." NB - for the most part, most photo inkjet papers (Luster, various Glossies, glossy Canvas) will work the same with that Premium Glossy profile. I mix-and-match Fiber Gloss, Premium Glossy, Premium Luster, from either Epson or Moab - and the prints all look the same. It is only if you are using matte papers that the profiles may get really different for each paper type and brand.

(You can get third-party hardware/software to create your own paper profiles, but Epson's canned profiles are quite good. Other paper makers (Moab, Kodak, Hahnemühle, Ilford inkjet.....) usually have profiles for their own papers available online for free download.)

And choosing a Rendering Intent - by default, "Relative Colorimetric" is preferred, with "Perceptual" as a secondary choice. Complex to explain the exact difference, which practically speaking is very little except with strongly-saturated colors.

And turning on/off Black Point Compensation - usually ON is best to keep the shadows open and with maximum detail.

My own settings for PhotoShop (LR's big brother) on a Mac Pro and Cinema display

- Working Color Space: Adobe RGB 1998

- Display profile: custom-built with Apple's software, for gamma 2.2, white point D5400. Display brightness adjusted by hand, as Exodies says, to match "screen white" to "paper white" - usually that is 50-60% of the maximum brightness the Mac display can produce.

- Printing dialogue box settings: "Photoshop Manages Color," "SC-P800 series Exhibition Fiber Glossy" paper profile, "Relative Colorimetric" rendering intent, "Black Point Compensation" - ON.

In Epson's own control panel (accessed from the PS Print Dialogue via the tab "Print Settings") the only thing I set is the basic paper type, to control which black ink gets used (photo or matte): "Printer Settings - Photo Paper."

[jaapv]

 

I stand by my "next to useless", Andy

Yes, I am not surprised that a person with as much experience as you is able to eyeball it precisely using  Apple's tools

However, most persons with average experience and/or less acute ability to judge the comparison diagrams will fail. I think the OP falls in the last category, as do most of us.

It is no great hardship to invest 150$ in a colorimeter and software  and be sure.

[adan]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

There's certainly a difference between calibrating and profiling, and the Apple software will not profile a screen, which can be a problem, serious or minor. It just hasn't been a problem for me with my screen. If I were having problems, I'd certainly invest in a good colorimeter for profiling, preferably one that can measure reflected colors (for printing calibration) as well as transmitted colors from a glowing screen.

The Apple software does OK at screen calibrating - setting the gross color balance (white point) and contrast (gamma) - combined with manually setting the screen brightness so that "paper white" and "screen white" are equally bright under one's working conditions.

The following is a general comment, not a response to Jaap, who knows all this.

All devices in the imaging chain have quirks in how they render the hue and saturation of individual colors: cameras, scanners, computer screens, printers, papers, (even color films, if one uses film - or printing presses, in the professional media world). A hardware profile adjusts for those individual color variations, as well as performing a calibration for contrast and general white point.

Profiling with a colorimeter hardware/software kit reads individual known colors from a target image (anywhere from 60 or so to several hundred) and tweaks them to be numerically correct - making sure that greens, for example, are not too yellow or too blue or too bright or too saturated or not saturated enough, even if grays or other colors are correct. We feed the target image (or the individual colors in sequence) to our screens or printer, measure the output with a colorimeter, and the attached software figures out how far the screen or print is from 'accurate" and builds a profile that will tweak all the colors back to the correct "known" value - as displayed on paper or a monitor.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

Ideally, every step in the imaging chain has been profiled - we can profile cameras in LightRoom, Camera Raw, Capture One, etc. etc.; with colorimeters, we can profile our screens; we can profile our printers and paper - so that a given red photographed from the real world will stay the same red as it moves from sensor (or film and scanner) to software to screen to paper. We also have "canned" profiles available - from Leica ("M10 Embedded"), from Adobe ("Adobe Standard"), from Epson or Canon for their printers with their papers.

[leica dream]

IO had the same problem recently when I migrated to a new iMAC desktop. 

I used Colormunki to calibrate the screen then used a firm called "Pure Profiles" to profile my Epson WF-3010 printer using specially printed sheets from the iMAC, (which cost something like £15) on my default paper type.

Works fine now.

 

[jaapv]

Just one thing: I bought a Retina Macbook 13" not too long ago, calibrated it etc.  The results seemed fine, plenty of likes on the forum etc. This week I started preparing an article and transferred the images to my MacPro, which has a fully colour-managed workflow and two Eizo CG screens - 21" and 27". I had to redo 12 out of 16 images! 😡

[philipus]

Hi Graeme

It may be useful to create two (or more, depending on need) profiles for a display. For instance my print profile is quite dark to make it easy to obtain prints which match what's on the screen. But it doesn't work well for other uses, like viewing movies, gaming or such, so for that one can make a brighter profile. It's quite easy to switch between profiles (as Andy set out above in Sys Prefs-Display).

br
Philip

[Nick_S]

Further to Adan's outline of profiling, even accurately profiled devices will show colour shifts as images move from one gamut to another, the degree to which depends on the chosen rendering intent, e.g., Relative, Absolute Colorimetric, Perceptual, or Saturation. Colour management systems adapt some or all colours in an image to the limitations of a particular display or printer. Often the choice will be between Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual rendering intents. Relative Colorimetric preserves the in-gamut colours while moving the out-of-gamut colours to the nearest available on that device, while Perceptual additionally shifts the in-gamut colours so that the perceived relationship between the colours remains the same (the risk being that it overly desaturates the image).

Edited April 12, 2019 by Nick_S

[jaapv]

Yes, and a gamut mismatch between device and file can produce unexpected errors. The wisest thing is to use Adobe RGB and hardware that can match (especially a monitor). Personally I have a habit of "dumbing down" to sRGB for print, as I have no confidence in the ability of most printers to handle Adobe RGB.

[Jeff S]

ImagePrint does an excellent job with its paper profiles (for multiple lighting situations) in conjunction with its own printer driver (Epson for me, but now also available for Canon).  I use it for all my printing (as an external editor for LR).

Jeff