Colorsync–for Susan S.

BB
Posted By
Barbara_Brundage
Apr 24, 2004
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164
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4
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Hi, Susan. A while ago you were asking me about colorsync settings and I’ve been fooling around with this a lot in full photoshop, too. After much experimentation I’ve found that for me, at least, (this is always a YMMV thing, I’m afraid), the answer is that for the few tagged files I work with, the colorsync setting is irrelevant. But most of the stuff I’m doing now is required to be untagged, and for that I get much, much better results if I tell colorsync to default to my monitor profile.

However, having said that — I mean I get better prints to the i9100. My little HP 920C just shrugs and pays no attention, but I’ve never had as much trouble getting good color from it as from the canon, although there’s no comparison where image quality is concerned.
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SS
Susan_S.
Apr 25, 2004
Interesting. Thanks for that Barbara. Mine is set for sRGB – I’m using this as a working space now as it’s what my low end printer seems to prefer… I’m still not sure when or if this colorsync setting is actually used in Elements or PS, as I always use the printer colour controls rather than a profile or colorsync – does it just come into play with unmanaged apps, or when colorsync is used in the printer controls? I remain confused…documentation of the interaction of some of these OS/printer/application features would be really nice!

Susan S.
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Barbara_Brundage
Apr 25, 2004
Hi, Susan. I forwarded your questions to someone who works in prepress and is also an Apple guru. Here’s the reply:

In a nutshell, the settings you apply in ColorSync under Preferences on the Default Profiles tab and the assigned profiles under the Devices section are only applied to the entire input/output color conversion control of ColorSync if the program you are using has no built in ColorSync controls of its own.

This is what happens in the case of the part of the question you posted above that reads "does it just come into play with unmanaged apps" Here the answer is yes. The color management of an application that has no ColorSync controls written into it will be handled by ColorSync according to whatever profiles are set in the ColorSync utility.

A program like Photoshop bypasses any settings in the ColorSync utility. It does use ColorSync to manage color, but all choices for color settings such as monitor, scanner and printer profiles are selected within Photoshop. Which profiles you choose in the ColorSync utility has no effect on Photoshop’s color management – input or output.
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Susan_S.
Apr 26, 2004
Excellent! Thank you so much. That is really useful information. And it was what I was hoping was true!
SusanS
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Barbara_Brundage
Apr 27, 2004
Susan, I’ve been discussing this more with Kurt. He also doesn’t know why it’s so often necessary to set up color sync for printing from PE in panther when it shouldn’t be relevant, but he did have this to say when I said I use my monitor profile rathet than one of the generic RGB settings:

That’s what I use. After I created my monitor profile with a Monaco Optix XR, I set that as my RGB color space in Photoshop. It really makes no sense to use any of the RGB color space profiles provided. None of them are based on the RGB phosphors of your monitor. No sense using a profile that is either larger than your monitor can even display, or shorter than it’s capable of.

EDIT Sorry, out of context it sounds like he just means to use your monitor profile in photoshop, but we were talking about colorsync settings.

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