Photoshop Color Management

Hi Alexander

Colour mangement in PS is awful

Try www.aim-dtp.net which may help. It worked for me, bt some of the geeks here think that Timo is a geek too. I’m just an amateur photographer so don’t really know. Another site is www.inkjetart.com/custom which may

you to calibrate your Epson from the monitor

Best of luck. I’m moving increasingly to Paint shop Pro which doesn’t have these problems

Hi everybody,

I have some questions about (non-professional) color management with Photoshop.

My configuration:
– Photoshop 7.0.1 on Windows XP,
– ICM Profiles for the printer (Epson Stylus C84) and my monitor (EIZO L885),
– CM set to L885 for RGB working space,
– A digital proof for the C84 printer created with the C84 .icm-file. – Printing to color space of the C84 is enabled in PS.
– In the options dialog of my printer I set color management to Windows’ own ICM. The driver should not perform Epson’s own PhotoEnhance or something like that.

I’ve read the chapter about CM in the PS manual but couldn’t get a clue why this does not work:
– I created a new CMYK image in PS and painted three distinct areas of _clean_ cyan, magenta and yellow.
– A black area (K:100%, C: 60%, M, Y: 50%) was added, too.

– When I enable "Gamut warning" (See menu "View" -> third item. Please correct me if this menu item is named differently in english versions – mine is localized to german.), the cyan and yellow area turn gray as if the printer isn’t able to print them correctly. It’s a little confusing: A CMYK printer isn’t able to print clean CMYK in separated areas? When I print the test image, PS remains right: C, M and Y are not printed as displayed. C turns blue and M turns red. Y is yellow, but spotted with little M and C ink dots as some kind of diffuse dithering was applied. So yellow is printed a little darker than displayed. The white area ouside the colored is not white, but also slightly spotted with cyan.
I don’t understand what PS and/or Windows’ ICM does. Is the CMYK image converted back into RGB and then sent to the printer? Is is better to use RGB images at all?

Also, my pictures are printed a little darker than displayed on the monitor (with digital proof turned on).

Another question. Which monitor color temperature is the best for digital imaging? I’ve read about 5000K, but all the white areas seem to be a little red-biased when my monitor’s color temperature is set to this value.
Thanks for your help in advance,

Alex

X-Post, F’Up set to adobe.photoshop.windows

There has always been controversy regarding how best to deal with colors that are indicated as "out of gamut." One way to do this is to allow the selection to occur, then desaturate the areas about 10 percent, then go back and do it over and over until everything "passes." Some claim you should progressively desaturate the whole image, but that’s not right either. It’s not something you’d want to have to do for a big pile of images. Does anyone have a better and/or more effective way to do this?