Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

My local camera club put on a lecture last night on all things Colour, camera, monitor and printer profiling.

One item regarding Soft Proofing has got me somewhat confused.  I have asked a question of the club members and have a reply which only makes me more confused.

So I quote my question below, in the hope that members of this forum can unconfuse me

Quote

There was one item I could not understand - I wonder if any member can
explain.
 
He created a Munki printer profile, then did a soft proof display, which
was awful and required further attention in PS.
 
Question - Why was it awful? surely the purpose of the printer profile
is to give same colours as on the 'profiled' screen.
 
I don't use PS,  but I have just done a test with my preferred printing
program using paper manufacturer's profile and this does not happen.
 
Also, as far as I am aware 'soft proof' depends entirely on the accuracy      )
of the printer profile, monitor profile, and image profile, it shows                )
only colours and should not be used to judge image sharpness, quality of   )  Note. I lifted this off Qimage manual
interpolation etc. so it is not going to look 100% anyway, printing a           )
test strip would give 100%.                                                                    )
 
I would have thought it brought into question the accuracy of the Munki
generated profile and/or one of the the other profiles involved, either
way it appeared to be one step forward and half a dozen backward.

End Quote

Jeff
 
 

Jeff,

I think you were right in what you say, Mike explains it well. Your club guys have probably got it all messed up with adobe applying its profiles, colour munki doing its, and most likely win7 screwing with it all as well.

Don't worry about it, as long as you get the results you want with your gear, leave them to do it the hard way.

Best wishes,

Ray

(currently with a cheap 6bit unprofiled monitor (other than by eye). You want to know something? My prints are as good or as bad as they ever were. If I were sending images for outside printing, then it may be different, of course.)

Hmm.  That's strange.  Where did you get that?  That's not anything I wrote and it's not in the Qimage manual.  I recognized that wasn't mine right away because I'd never put extra characters in the word "color".   ;D

Here's the quote from the Qimage manual:

Remember that soft proofing is designed to give you an idea of printed color by displaying a
simulation of your prints on screen. Soft proofing should not be used to judge image sharpness,
quality of interpolation, or any facets of image quality other than color. Also note that the
accuracy of soft proofing depends entirely on the accuracy of your printer profile, monitor
profile, and image profile. In the process of generating a soft proof, two separate profile
conversions are being performed, using your image profile and monitor profile once and your
printer profile twice! Due to the number of conversions required, it is important to ensure the
accuracy of all of your ICC profiles and the proper use of color management in Qimage in
order to get the most out of soft proofing.

Mike

I don't rely on it, I just use it as a rough guide.

I commented on a Luminous Landscape thread that Rob Sheppard, author of The Epson printing book says the only true way to evaluate and adjust your images is to "Print" them, and make any necessary tweaks.

If you have some time to kill you should read what some have to say on the subject in a fairly recent thread at LL.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=51331.0

Hmm.  That's strange.  Where did you get that?  That's not anything I wrote and it's not in the Qimage manual.  I recognized that wasn't mine right away because I'd never put extra characters in the word "color".   Grin

Sorry for the miss quote, it was my editing of your manual. 

The lecture was in general very good.  But he spent 10mins creating the printer profile only to end up with a terrible image and then returned to PS and messed around with curves etc. I just could not and still cannot understand.  (and there was no time to ask)

I am very new to printer, xmas present to my self, and was thinking of getting a Munki, but am now reconsidering.

Regards

Jeff

Thanks for that link, just had a quick read and will come back to it again later

When I have used the Soft Proof, the soft proof screen display has always been very close, certainly, I have never seen a difference I would want to go back and tweak out.
but being new to printing I am still, hopefully, learning.  Any way I have so far only wasted two sheets of expensive paper and they were silly mistakes in image placement.

Jeff
 

Jeff

Don't give up on the Colormunki, it's an excellent piece of kit, and will produce very good printer and monitor profiles very easily.
As Mike said soft proofing is a very complex affair, and to be honest has very little relevance to inkjet printing where the printer gamut exceeds the monitor gamut. It is used in the litho printing industry when they are printing to a small gamut, such as cardboard packaging, and they want to see the result of the rendering intent (which can be significant), but they spend a lot of time setting it up first.
As for camera club lecturers .......... :-\ :-\

Brian

www.secalis.co.uk