Colour Management Questions

This business of color management really sends me for a loop. I thought I understood it ,at least in principle, from the tutorials but the more that is written about it the more confusing it becomes. I use Elements 7 for post processing, my monitor is not calibrated but what difference does it make if I color process and get ( in my opinion) an acceptable color rendition. I cannot control the color of my printer, I guess it is too old so I assume it uses sRGB wether I like it or not. By the way what is an embedded color space.
Help, Paul. ATB

To address the bucket of colour analogy drawn make sure you are in 16 bit or over with pro space or you could degrade your colour info rather than improve it if you are in 8bit colour modes. The pro space doesn't increase the actual shade count as such it just allows them to be taken from a wider selection. Indeed for printing purposes (especially the 8 colour ink and over systems) you will get more available tones than sRGB can encompass and aRGB isn't that much wider a space so pro or a custom space is great idea. You just need to make sure there is space for those extra shades to be addressed at once if need be or you could lose tones or accentuated banding or create other artifacts.

On the monitor PC and mac are prob capable of the same BUT work very differently I assume, well windows and macOS I should say. BSD and Linux work different to windows also so it's not about a mac vs pc thing really. Onscreen there is slight difference (especially things like greens available) between aRGB and sRGB but it shouldn't be that noticable under particular conversion. The method of conversion along with how many of the extra shades you see could make things appear very different since tones might be displayed different than the theoretical standard they represent.

As for the heretical part if it works for you it doesn't matter if people agree since it works so my advice would be stick with it. If your images look fine to you and print the way you want then a different way isn't needed. Why fix it if it isn't broken?

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Originally Posted by Paul

my monitor is not calibrated but what difference does it make if I color process and get ( in my opinion) an acceptable color rendition.

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Hi Paul,

If your talking about an acceptable colour rendition on your monitor (printer is a seperate issue) then it doesn't make any difference if your images are only ever viewed on your monitor.

Where it starts to matter is when your displaying images elsewhere. For example, if you have a monitor with a strong magenta cast you'll be processing your images so that they look right on your monitor - (which means that your probably adding a strong green cast to counter the magenta) - so when other look at your images on their screen they'll see an image with a green cast.

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I cannot control the color of my printer, I guess it is too old so I assume it uses sRGB wether I like it or not. By the way what is an embedded color space.

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You don't control the colour of printers anyway, per sec - Photoshop (or PSE) will adjust what's fed to the printer (ideally) based on a printer profile so that any colour issues are nulled out.

Hi Paul,

I'm keeping out of the main discussion because I know little about it, but I noticed there was one question not covered by the above answers; an embedded profile is (I believe) where, whatever the colour space of an image is, it is named in the EXIF, or meta-data, tags. IF it is set correctly, when you use some browsers, they should use this to display the picture properly. Most editing package software can have a preference set to either render the picture using it, or not (i.e. ignore it).

Colin may well pick this up and clarify some more.

Cheers,

Sorry - missed the "embedded profile" bit.

In short "what Dave said".

Long answer, think of an image as being a bit like "the ingredients to bake a cake", and a profile "the recipe it should be cooked in your particular oven".

Without the recipe you may still be able to bake the cake, but it may not turn out the way you like it (for example, it may require more or less cooking time in your particular oven).

So passing on the ingredients AND recipe (image and profile) is better. However - having just said that - if the image is tagged with the likes of sRGB or Adobe RGB then that's like saying "just use a standard Adobe-class oven" (sRGB and Adobe RGB are standards in their own right).

Pickup a copy of Real World Color Management 2nd edition by Fraser, Murphy, and Bunting if you'd like to learn more (it's the foundation for any education in Colour Management).

I'd second colin on that book, it's packed with everythign you could ever need. I knew enough about colour management for my own needs before started flicking through that but in reality there is always more to learn (in my case a lot more) so recommend it to those who don't understand and those who do already. For example we might know bits we understand the effect of but not the why or how, and it might seem like dry theory but applying this to real world applications and you can get a lot more out of your current situation IMO.

I'd pretty much guarantee there is more to learn that will be useful to everyone. Another thing is whenever you have colour related issues/probs more correct info and mechanics of cm helps solve it simply and painlessly. Lastly uit's very broad coverage and there is a lot in there that applies to working on colour images that could be useful from editing POV so not just about display and print colour matching.

A very good resource for basic intro to color management can be found here. These folks talk about printer calibration, ICC profiles and monitor calibration. I found it to be a good read to get my basics straight.

One more strong vote for the book Real World Color Management by Bruce Frase et. al. That is by far the most concise collection of material pertaining to color management that I have found.

Cheers!
Sai
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