Relation between Monitor profile and Printer profile

darthkir

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Hi,

I have a setup like this;

Samsung 226BW LCD monitor
Canon Pixma IP4300
Adobe Photoshop CS3

My objective is to COLOR MANAGE everything from my LCD up to printing using my new printer. FYI, I shoot with dslr and my photo uses Adobe RGB profile. Some info you may need to know;

1. Currently I'm using the OEM ink (bundled with printer, its new)
2. I don't have any software to generate profile (eg Profile Prism)
3. I don't have any hardware to color manage my lcd (eg SpyderPro)

I calibrate my gamma setting previously using Adobe Gamma and now using the Samsung driver (it gives better result IMHO). So i am now sure that my lcd is calibrated the best way possible without using hardware (which should give better result theoretically).

My questions;

1. Should I use the profile I created in the samsung driver in 1) photoshop and in 2)printer?
2. How do I profile my printer to be used with 3rd party ink and paper without software like Profile Prism?
3. I tried printing using my monitor profile and the result has heavy yellow cast. Why?

Please advise.
 

Grandad35

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You have obviously spent some serious money on Photoshop and your monitor. As such, I assume that you are serious about color management. There are a number of threads dealing with this subject - they can be found by entering "color AND management" (without the quotes) in the search box. For a smaller list, enter "color AND management AND fraser". Start with this thread (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=118).

To get your colors under control, you will have to:
1. Spend some time learning about color management. Specifically, read and reread "Real World Color Management" by Bruce Fraser until it makes sense. Here are a few more good links on the subject to get you started:
http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/color_management.htm
2. Buy a hardware calibration device for your monitor. Here is one of several commonly used monitor calibartion devices (http://www.amazon.com/Gretag-Macbet...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1183115569&sr=8-1). Software based calibration solutions have been around for a long time, but they do not give satisfactory results - Adobe no longer even supports its "Adobe Gamma" solution. Since you have already tried both Adobe's Gamma and Samsung's solutions, one (or both) of these programs installed a driver that loads at startup and which may overwrite any hardware based profiles - you will have to remove these drivers from the startup list.
3. Have a custom profile made for your ink/paper/printer. Note that you already installed several such profiles generated by Canon for their ink/paper/printer, and these profiles should give good results if you stick to their ink and paper. However, if you refill or use 3rd party carts the Canon profiles will probably not be acceptable.
4. Consider getting a printer that uses at least 4 inks to print photos (C/M/Y, plus a dye based black) instead of just C/M/Y. A printer that only uses 3 inks cannot generate accurate/deep blacks. I saw in another post that you plan to refill. I would look for a used printer like an i9900 (http://cgi.ebay.com/Canon-i9900-Pho...3QQihZ002QQcategoryZ67370QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) that has 6-8 colors and which doesn't use chipped cartridges.
5. Look at Qimage for printing. It is color aware and much more flexible than Photoshop. Canon's E-Z Photo Print will not allow you to use custom printer profiles.
darthkir said:
1. Should I use the profile I created in the samsung driver in 1) photoshop and in 2)printer?
No and no. A monitor profile is ONLY used to modify the data that is sent to the monitor.
darthkir said:
2. How do I profile my printer to be used with 3rd party ink and paper without software like Profile Prism?
Buy a custom profile (e.g. http://www.cathysprofiles.com/).
darthkir said:
3. I tried printing using my monitor profile and the result has heavy yellow cast. Why?
Because the monitor profile has nothing to do with the printer, and it will produce strange and unpredictable results when used in this way.

You have a lot if work ahead of you to set up a color managed workflow, but the results are well worth it. I shoot in RAW, adjust the color temperature in ACR and never have to worry about the colors since everything is calibrated.
 

stratman

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Grandad35 said:
Look at Qimage for printing. It is color aware and much more flexible than Photoshop. Canon's E-Z Photo Print will not allow you to use custom printer profiles.
Grandad35:

Have you experimented with Adobe's Lightroom? If so, how does Qimage compare with it?

I looked at a number of their tutorial videos on the website last night and Lightroom looked pretty nice.

Agree that Canon's printing software is feature poor but is probably enough for the masses.
 

Grandad35

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stratman said:
Have you experimented with Adobe's Lightroom? If so, how does Qimage compare with it?

I looked at a number of their tutorial videos on the website last night and Lightroom looked pretty nice.
Like you, I have looked at the videos, but I have no direct experience with Lightroom. From what I have read about it, Lightroom is targeted toward professional photographers who have to process large numbers of images quickly - e.g. wedding photographers. You can apparently make simple adjustments, but if you want to do any serious editing, it looks like you still have to process the photo in Photoshop. The things that they show in the printing module are all available in Qimage, plus a lot more. You can download a free demo if you want to give it a test ride (but it only runs on Windows).

For my non-professional, low volume needs (about 200 "keepers"/month), I plan on sticking with Photoshop and Qimage.
 

mikling

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Lightroom and Qimage are really two non competing products. So a comparison really cannot be made despite some overlap at the print level. My estimation is that Qimage has to evolve or else they will be nudged out as Qimage can be seen as one module within Lightroom.

Lightroom is really geared towards photographers who shoot RAW and allows batch processing for these shots. The algorithms for processing within Lightroom use the same engine as what is used in Adobe Camera RAW 4.1 which is a FREE plug-in for Photoshop CS3. Shooting RAW opens up a whole new level of control at the PC level that shooting JPEGs and then editing cannot begin to approach. A simplistic way of describing the process is this, Lightroom and Camera RAW replaces much of the processing that takes place within the camera and leaves it under your control at the PC level. Your choice of software will determine what results you seek, it is now truly your own digital darkroom ( hence Adobe's choice of LIGHTROOM). What is interesting is that with this method, the key elements of a digital camera come BACK to a lens, exposure and quality of sensor within the camera. Processing is left to software....just like developing film and exposing photos. This affords a WIDE latitude for adjustment after the fact if the sensor is good ( just like you could with good film). One advantage is that as processing algorithms improve over the years, the pictures you captured as a RAW image can be reprocessed and improved as well. With jpegs, you are not able to capitalize on improvements.
I use Qimage for high quality resampling and optimizing paper use, it also has some nice interfaces for handling custom printer profiles. As Lightroom evolves these features will probably swamp out Qimage as the compelling engine will be RAW processing. I also find that it is convenient to use Qimage to resample and feed the print driver the native resolution it likes to see. Qimage does a better job of this than the Epson print driver itself.

For mission critical shots where you don't have time to keep reviewing your exposures etc, you shoot RAW because you have a better chance of recovering a good shot that was metered improperly at the wrong setting. I've recovered shots that were toast as a jpeg but usable when RAW processing was invoked. Not the best shot but at least you got the right moment.

As for matching the monitor, without hardware, if you are lucky, it could be good enough. If you currently find that your monitor correlates well with your output, you may be happy with it. As for custom printer profiling, another way to determine if it is necessary, is to use the original inks and print a reference photo with Canon media using the print profiles supplied and mark down all the settings used. ( Using original Canon inks and genuine media should bring you very close to the reference.) Store this away. Now when you get refill inks, reprint this with the same paper and let it dry for a day or so and then compare. If the prints are to your eyes identical, no printer profiling is necessary. If it is close enough, then nothing needs to be done. If you are now dissatisfied with the color, then either you try other inks and/or get a custom printer profile.
Do not mix up monitor profiles and printer profiles. Simplistically, a profile can be thought of as an adjustment file that gets your equipment to duplicate a reference. So a monitor profile is a file that the system uses to adjust the monitor so that it shows what a reference should show. Same for a printer. Profiles can only compensate so much, so if you have inks that are very imprecise compared to the originals a custom profile may not bring you all the way back to the reference. It is best to try and get as close as possible to the original so the profile will do its best to home in for you.

If you're printing with a profile, you turn off color management at the Canon printer driver and you let the editing software like Photoshop take over. You CANNOT have photoshop print with a printer profile and NOT turn off the color managemnt at the Canon driver. The most common mistake is this aspect.

Your adventure has begun.
 

stratman

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Thanks to Grandad35 and Mikling for the comments.

Reading the websites of the softwares it seemed like there was a great deal of overlap than difference between the two. One thing Qimage stressed was the ability to resample and send to the printer a higher resolution, for example from 300 to 600 dpi, to match the capability of your printer (if your printer can accept higher resolutions). Lightroom and/or Photoshop can not do this?

One thing I liked about Lightroom was it did nondestructive editing. My cursory reading of Qimage's website did not find anything concerning this. I'm not sure this is a deal breaker for me.

Except for maybe some differences in ICC profiling handling and cost, the only other functional difference of Qimage I can tell is the internal print optimization algorithms for best printer output. If true, is Qimage worth the cost just for this feature, since pretty much everything else can be done by Photoshop?
 

on30trainman

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stratman said:
One thing I liked about Lightroom was it did nondestructive editing. My cursory reading of Qimage's website did not find anything concerning this. I'm not sure this is a deal breaker for me.
When you are done editing in QImage it gives you the option of "associating" the editing as a .flt file. The original is maintained and whenever you open the edited file in QImage, by selecting the picture you want in the normal way, the editing properties are applied to the picture. Edited files are indicated by RED files names rather than BLACK for unedited ones - at least in my setup. You can also make a completely new picture file with all the editing parameters included. I always use the "associate" method so I don't lose my original. Hope I explained this clearly enough. I have been using QImage for about a year now and am very pleased with it. Used Corel Photo Paint before.

Steve W.
 

stratman

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on30trainman said:
stratman said:
One thing I liked about Lightroom was it did nondestructive editing. My cursory reading of Qimage's website did not find anything concerning this. I'm not sure this is a deal breaker for me.
When you are done editing in QImage it gives you the option of "associating" the editing as a .flt file. The original is maintained and whenever you open the edited file in QImage, by selecting the picture you want in the normal way, the editing properties are applied to the picture. Edited files are indicated by RED files names rather than BLACK for unedited ones - at least in my setup. You can also make a completely new picture file with all the editing parameters included. I always use the "associate" method so I don't lose my original. Hope I explained this clearly enough. I have been using QImage for about a year now and am very pleased with it. Used Corel Photo Paint before.

Steve W.
Thanks Steve W.. I figured Qimage worked along those lines - saving a copy of the altered image plus the original.

Once you alter and save an image, can you open it and peel away the alterations made, or is the altered file once saved no longer capable of being taken stepwise back to its original state?

Also, while working with the original file, are there any steps in the work flow that once done are impossible to undo (destructive editing) without starting over from scratch with the original image?

Last, are you using any other image manipulation software besides Qimage?
 

Grandad35

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stratman said:
Except for maybe some differences in ICC profiling handling and cost, the only other functional difference of Qimage I can tell is the internal print optimization algorithms for best printer output. If true, is Qimage worth the cost just for this feature, since pretty much everything else can be done by Photoshop?
Qimage is a Cadillac for printing. Photoshop is a Cadillac for image manipulation. Try to print 5 different photos at different sizes on the same sheet of paper with Photoshop - not an easy task. What if the images use different color spaces? What if you want to print 100 different 4x6 proofs scaled down to 3.3x5 inches so that they fit 4 to each 8.5x11 sheet? These jobs only take a few seconds to set up with Qimage, but can be quite a chore with Photoshop. There is probably nothing that you can print with Qimage that you can't also print with Photoshop (except for maybe its superior up-res routines), but Qimage is just so much easier and faster to use. On the other hand, there are LOTS of editing functions that you can perform in Photoshop that you can't perform in Qimage.

Since you have CS3, use it for your editing. If you only plan on printing an occasional single image on a single sheet of paper, you don't need Qimage.

Take a look at this link (http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/quality/) and run the test on your printer. Try the free 30 day trial version and form your own opinion(http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/downloads.htm).
 

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darthkir said:
Hi,

I have a setup like this;

Samsung 226BW LCD monitor


Please advise.
I just profiled a monitor like samsung 226BW for a client. The colors were very good when calibrated. Unfortunately, I had to reduce blue channel to almost zero during calibration. That means monitor oversaturates in blue, also color was close to 9800K before calibration.

If you are interested, PM me and I can give you a profile I have created along with some information how to setup your monitor so you can try how it works for you. It will be more close than software calibration but unfortunately every monitor is different so don't expect 100% satisfaction.
 
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