Where Do I Start?

[Walter]

Hey everybody,

A little background - I'm a New Media student in Dallas, Texas. My area of focus is on interactive, but the assignments at school are often print, or at least require printed versions of whatever I'm working on. I'm finally to a point where I fuss over colors being correct, but I know jack about color management for print and have been running into a lot of frustration trying to match my screen to our printer.

My parents and I have a Canon i9900 here at the house, which I know is capable of some really great prints. I'm running a MacBook Pro, with an additional Envision LCD monitor. I'm running Adobe CS4, and I have a Spyder 2 monitor calibrator that I've run to try and get my laptop and monitor more accurate. I've tried printing on a variety of paper; right now I'm using Epson Premium Presnetation Paper Matte Double Sided (S041568). I think the next step is to know the in's and out's of color profiles and color management. But I don't know where to start.

What's U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, and why is it set as my CMYK working space? What *is* a working space? Should I enable or disable preservation of RGB numbers when printing? What's the difference between printing a document versus a document's proof?

Any starting place would be great, FAQs or books or websites...

 

[gordo]

This might be heresy, however, just a thought, that might be enough for your purposes - worth a try.
Try working with your images in the sRGB color space (Edit-->Assign profile-->sRGB). Most desktop printers expect images tagged with this color profile rather than CMYK images.

best, gordon p

my print blog here: Quality In Print

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Some places for colour information:

I writen a few posts on layers, that forum is I think a more "designer/photographer" forum.
You may want to check out.
from photographer perspective:
WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial - Test Page FireFox 3 Safari - FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop ColorManagement
or artists perspective:
The Dimensions of Colour
Also regestering with xrite and doing their online training.

 

[Werby]

Gordo has a good point in that inkjets are expecting RGB data, so you should just stay in RGB. If you are just printing out stuff that is actually meant to be viewed on screen, don't bother converting to CMYK at all, so don't worry about SWOP.

Keep everything in RGB and when it is time to print, have photoshop convert to the printer profile, either relative colorimetric if you colors aren't too bright and saturated, or perceptual if they are. This should get you a pretty good match to your screen if your monitor is properly calibrated. I'm not familiar with "preserve RGB numbers" but I would venture that you would want to let photoshop do whatever it had to in order to get the right colors so I would say don't preserve.

A crucial step with color management is to make sure you are only doing it once. If you are having photoshop do it, make sure all color management is off in the printer settings, or vice versa if the printer is doing it. I've sometimes had better results letting the printer driver driver do color management, in which case you want it all off in photoshop. There is inevitably a fair amount of trial and error to get acceptable results, and quite possibly you'll never get "perfect" results unless you got custom profiles for your printer condition.

-Todd Shirley

 

[alan4color]

You might consider getting the book: Real World Color Management by Bruce Fraser. It really gives a solid foundation to the process.

 

[Walter]

Thanks everybody!