How to deal with hardwood material

[Eflatun]

Hello all,
I am working for a printinghouse and one of our customer wanted us to print hardwood catalogue. He provide 300 hardwoods with diffrent tones. With my prepress color knowledge i prepared a room with 5000K illuminat light, took pictures together with a colorcheck chart. I open pictures in photoshop and assingned Adobe RGB profile. Then converted to my output profile. When i print digital proof of the picture, colorchecker chart looked very close to original but wood surface looked very different. So there is no problem to take pictures from opaque accurately but hardwood surface is hard to deal. If anyone here worked with such materials, any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks
Eflatun

[Colin Southern]

Hi Eflatun,

If you're shooting RAW then you'd ASSIGN a profile (Adobe RGB is fine so long as you're not going out of gamut during the printing process) (unlikely), otherwise (if you still wanted to use Adobe RGB) then you'd need to CONVERT TO (not assign) Adobe RGB. You're probably doing this correctly already, but it's a very common mistake to have an image with a profile (typically sRGB) and then assign a new one, rather than converting to a new one.

Lighting for hardwoods is critical - if you're getting any degree of reflection then you'll have all sorts of problems - so they really need to be shot in a controlled environment where (diffuse) lighting can be kept outside of the family of angles, and the woods kept isolated from picking up other colour contamination from within the room. The actual temperature of the lights isn't a major concern, so long as you shoot an accurate neutral gray reference, and use this to white-balance the shot afterwards.

Also, you might like to consider something like a colour passport to generate an accurate camera profile.

Hope this helps.

[Eflatun]

Thanks for your reply Colin,

As you said, I am shooting RAW and assigning Adobe RGB profile. I guess reflection from wood surface is behaviouring different and therefore colors are shifting. Btw neutral gray from opaque reference is fine. Now we have to do many proof printing and corrections in Photoshop. I am not sure wheter i can do an accurate camera profile but I'll keep testing. Thanks again for your suggestions.

[PhotomanJohn]

Eflatun - I have never tried it on wood but you might try a polarizing filter. Try fooling with the light positions and the angle of the polarizer and see what happens.

John

[chrisa62401]

I have color corrected wood products before. I perform retouching and color correction for a printing company, we print a catalog for a furniture manufacturer. I have found that converting to cmyk after basic correction is easier to work with. Then with a combination of curves, hue and saturation and selective color adjustment layers on a calibrated monitor is the most efficient way. Although I wasn't present at the photoshoot I did have some input. I requested slight under exposure with flat lighting and no specular highlights. Raw files were supplied to me also.