Guest WPalank Posted March 7, 2009 Share #1 Posted March 7, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) I took a workshop on "Black and White Printing" last weekend though Stephen Johnson, the guy that wrote this book and has worked with Hahnemühle in developing some of their papers: Stephen Johnson On Digital Photography Luckily his studio and workshop site is about 20 minutes door to door from my home in San Francisco. Anyway, besides being an excellent class he showed a very exact technique for soft proofing whites in an image through Photoshop. The only problem is that you need a spectrophotometer or access to someone that owns a spectrophotometer and can give you Lab paper values for the specific paper you are printing on. Fortunately for the people who took the course he has promised to give us the values if we give him a call. There are actually two ways to achieve the goal, the first only works in CS4. Open CS4 (I'm on a Mac) and go to Photoshop>Preferences>Interface and the in the dialogue box that appears select "Select Custom Color..." in the drop down menu: [ATTACH]130368[/ATTACH] Then in the Color Picker dialogue box that appears insert the lab values for the specific paper and hit OK again and then Save. [ATTACH]130369[/ATTACH] Now when you open a file in CS4 by toggling through the Screen modes by hitting the "F" key, one of the backgrounds will be your custom white beside neutral gray and black. The next technique can be done in CS3 and CS2 as well as 4. Open an image and go to Layer >New >Layer... and hit OK. Make sure the new empty layer is selected and draw a small rectangle with the rectangular marquee on the image. Anywhere you want as you will see in a second. Now go to Layer> New Fill Layer> Solid Color and hit OK. You will get the same color picker dialogue box as above. Input your Lab values as above and hit OK. Your Layers palette should look pretty much like the screenshot below. [ATTACH]130370[/ATTACH] Now hit the "V" key which will take you to the move tool so while the top layer is selected you can move the rectangle anywhere you like in the image to check for the absolute white of the paper you have chosen as demonstrated below. [ATTACH]130371[/ATTACH] To: [ATTACH]130372[/ATTACH] Why Lab you ask? Steve believes that between Adobe RGB and sRGB it's to arbitrary. lab is more exact. Also, don't forget to delete the "Color Fill" Layer before printing. I hope this helps. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted March 7, 2009 Posted March 7, 2009 Hi Guest WPalank, Take a look here Soft Proofing Whites. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
sandymc Posted March 7, 2009 Share #2 Posted March 7, 2009 One important caveat: for that process to always work you have to be using an absolute colorimetric rendering in your print flow. Otherwise all bets are off... Sandy Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
MV8 Posted March 10, 2009 Share #3 Posted March 10, 2009 Hummm? Sort of, the color/hue of the paper is not taken into consideration when printing B&W (or color) on top with this method. To softproof, you need to profile your printer, with those lab values you get from your printer, you can create a profile and you can load it in photoshop. This can be done by going to the "View" menu then "Proof Setup" and loading your profile. This will apply your paper lab values under your image while viewing in photoshop. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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