|
Scooter posted:Now for some color space questions: what do y'all use for color spaces when exporting from Lightroom? I export to SRGB, and the exported photos always look slightly darker outside of Lightroom. Is Lightroom converting to a different color space for display than Firefox/Irfanview? I haven't explicitly set a color space for my monitors; could that be the cause of the mismatch? LR uses ProPhotoRGB and then exports to whatever you tell it to. I always shoot and then export in Adobe RGB and then convert to sRGB for printing/web. This is a cool idea for a thread, I like seeing other people's processes. I will put up some of my stuff when I have some free time later.
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2009 21:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:12 |
|
|
Scooter posted:What's the benefit of converting to sRGB for printing? Isn't printing done with a CMYK color space that doesn't overlap exactly with sRGB? CMYK for offset, sRGB for inkjet.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2009 07:01
|
|
|
friendship waffle posted:inkjets still don't print in RGB. Even with extended inksets they don't have true red green and blue in additive color like your monitor does. Ink is fundamentally a subtractive color model. If the printer lays down a combination of red, green, and blue ink, it will not get white.  Your custom title is so well deserved. You mean printers don't print light? No loving poo poo. Name one printing process that isn't subtractive. Do you even print inkjet because you pretty clearly don't know what you're talking about here. Custom profiles are for the device not the image file. You can soft-proof the image using the custom profile but you don't convert to it. Your file still has to be in some kind of color space, and all inkjet printers (and their provided profiles or the profiles you make) expect sRGB files. If you don't know what you're talking about then please don't post it because you're just going to confuse everyone else.color managed printing workflow: convert image to sRGB -> let PS manage color -> select appropriate profile FOR THE DEVICE -> turn off color management in the device driver -> print And yes friendship waffle you should post some of your own work. I suspect that most of the time you're just trolling but I would like to figure out where to put you on my "pixel peeping amateur -> ok you don't suck" mental chart. edit: I'll point out that I was a printmaker for years before I became a photographer, and I have made 100+ custom profiles for inkjet printers so please back your bullshit up if you think I'm wrong (I'm not) brad industry fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jan 14, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2009 19:03
|
|
|
friendship waffle posted:I never have the printer handle color management, so the file is converted in photoshop or aperture using the profile for the printer (which is never sRGB) from what I am working in (which is not sRGB either in most cases). You do not know poo poo about color management, please stop posting. Your devices have their own profiles that are separate from the image. If you profile your monitor you assign that custom profile to that device (you don't convert your image to the monitor profile, right?). If you profile your printer/ink/paper you assign that profile to that device. This has absolutely nothing to do with the actual image file. Why the gently caress would you convert your image to a device profile? Image files are device neutral which is why you use a generic profile like sRGB. You send the image file tagged with the device-neutral colorspace it expects and then the device interprets that information through the filter of it's own custom profile. Replace "printer" with "monitor" or "scanner", same exact thing. If I print something and accidentally leave it in AdobeRGB I can immediately tell because the colors are way off, if I go back and convert to sRGB everything is fine. Now you might not be doing as color critical work as I am, but I am really, really anal about how my prints look and this stuff is not that complicated. edit: quote:In other words, the color profile for your printer can't "expect" sRGB for the colorspace as input, because the master colorspace is always the input for the conversion when going from one colorspace to another. The color profile tells you how to get to/from the master space to the colorspace specified by the profile. If you had ever actually made a custom profile it would be immediately obvious why this is 100% wrong. Just think about it for a second before your brain vomits all over your keyboard again. I'm not going to derail this any further, everyone please ignore anything friendship waffles says about color management because he doesn't understand how it works. I can't believe you wrote a paragraph about subtractive printing, what a needlessly pedantic gently caress you are. brad industry fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jan 14, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2009 19:44
|
|
|
quote:Brad Industry: if you don't think that photoshop is converting your document to the printer profile in the print dialog, then why does it give you black point conversion and rendering intent options? Do you even know what a color profile does? All PS is doing is skipping the device driver and sending along the image (tagged with your device-neutral profile) WITH the device profile to the device. Nothing happens in PS or on your computer. The conversion (it's not really a conversion, more like a filter) happens at the device level, the device profile just tells your printer how to correctly interpret the information in the image file. You can't send an image with no profile over, it has to have something, and for all inkjet printers they assume it's sRGB. When you make the custom profile you printed out a target file to calibrate to right? That target file was sRGB. Device and image profiles are completely separate - the image has one and the device has one, it's not either/or. All PS is letting you do is send these raw commands and information over and skip the poo poo your device driver normally does, it's not doing any sort of conversion. I don't know how else to explain it. Your monitor does the same thing. If you open an image on your screen the same process happens (this is oversimplified): Image with device neutral profile like sRGB / AdobeRGB -> gets sent by PS to OS -> OS sends image + profile over to video card WITH your device profile (custom monitor profile) -> Video card takes image information and filters it through the device profile -> Video card tells monitor how to correctly display image Please go read a book or something on this and stop posting about it. If your workflow works for you it's because you can't tell your prints are lovely or you somehow managed to accidentally pick the right sequence of steps despite not understanding how the process works. Just for reference here is how a correctly color managed workflow should work if you are printing from PS. This assumes you have custom profiles for your monitor/printer already: -Open your image -Convert to sRGB -Go to Print dialog -Select "Photoshop manages color" and whatever other rendering intents/options you chose when you made your custom profile -Select the custom profile - this is device, inkset, and paper specific -Go to printer driver dialog and turn off ALL color management (since you are doing it manually in PS you don't want the driver loving with it) -Select the correct media type (should choose the same thing as what you made the custom profile with) -Send to printer When you do this what happens is that PS sends the commands and information over instead of the driver applying it's (lovely) settings. Once it gets to the printer, the printer processes the image information using those commands and then filters everything through the device profile. The device profile is the last step, all it does is tell the printer nozzles how to adjust what ink it lays down (ie. "shift red this direction, shift blue here, etc." it's not doing anything to the image, it's telling the device how to adjust - that's why it's a DEVICE profile). brad industry fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jan 14, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2009 20:38
|
|
|
In the photo world your work is everything, I have worked for plenty of assholes that I respected anyways because their poo poo was good. Usually I just ignore friendship waffle's stupid bullshit, but I love printmaking and it is so obvious he is just pulling stuff out of his rear end in this thread for the sake of arguing I couldn't help but respond. The only reason friendship waffle won't post his stuff is either because he's a troll, his work sucks and he knows it, or the "professional" experience he loves to allude to is something unimpressive like shooting pimply teenagers in bumfuck nowhere. I don't post here for "validation" either, that is a bullshit excuse, I post here because I like to talk about photography and look at images. It is just common courtesy to post your own work so people know where you're coming from, so either post your images or shut the gently caress up. Anyways, let me pull together some images and I will make an actual post about post-processing...
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2009 07:05
|
|
|
Ok, so the way I work I pretty much always know what the shot is going to look like before I even think about shooting it, so post for me isn't a way to "fix" things, it's a way to reach the final goal. When I shot film I was big into the zone system/previsualizing so my goal then was to make the best negative possible for printing (which is not the same thing as making the best image straight-out-of-camera, if that makes sense). I think of RAW files as negatives so I don't really care what they look like as files, as long as the information is there that will let me make the print I want. For me the print is the final form of the image, so everything from location scouting to RAW processing is just a step toward that. Anyways here is how my most recent shoot progessed since this is still fresh in my mind... I had this image sketched out weeks ago and had scouted the location/model/props/etc. so everything from that point on was just trying to resolve what I had in my head and on paper into an image. RAW file straight out of camera:  In LR my goal is to get the tonal range and color to where I want it so I can finesse everything else in PS:  I corrected the color, boosted exposure by 1/3rd stop, hosed with the curve a little bit (brought highlights down a tiny bit and shadows up), and starting getting my color palette to where I wanted (boosted the yellow paper, brought back the original blue of the wall).  In PS I break it down into steps: 1. actual pixel manipulation - correct perspective, Liquify, crop, some compositing, etc. - I don't want to have to redo masks later 2. overall adjustments - for this image I just boosted contrast and upped the blue saturation to get it to how it was in real life 3. local adjustments - removed the yellow-ish tint from the table, brightened her eye a little bit, couple of other minor things (mostly removing tiny casts or upping the contrasts on certain spots - this image didn't need much but sometimes I get into 50+ adjustment layer territory if I am feeling particularly anal) Then I do final compositing and "polishing":  Added in the bubbles from other frames, Liquified her jacket a little so it didn't look so loving bulky. "Polish" is hard to see in these tiny files and I think I actually did it first on this one.. but basically I zoom in at 200-300% and go through every surface and remove imperfections with the patch (or clone) tool. For this one I spent about two hours going through and removing dings and scratches from the wall and smudges from the table surface. I also go through and remove annoying things (I ask myself "is this adding to the image?" and if not take it out) - on this one the sticker on the table, that blue thing on the right, the logo on the handle, and the writing on the tubing. I think that's it. This one was pretty straight forward.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2009 08:19
|
|
|
Can't you load a preset in PS's Lens Correction tool?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2009 00:33
|
|
|
Tziko posted:You can also Alt-click on the mask icon in the layers dialog to achieve this. Or you can just hit |
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2009 19:17
|
|
|
Bridge sucks and Lightroom is not meant to be a replacement for PS for editing. Do what you can in LR and then do the heavy post or retouching in PS.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2009 01:07
|
|
|
Bridge is awful for shooting tethered compared to basically anything else (ie Capture One). There is nothing in Bridge that other software doesn't do better. The only reason it still exists is because a ton of people are stubborn and still use it as a part of their crappy workflows.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2009 02:12
|
|
|
Mannequin posted:^^ How do you shoot so the photo you take on your camera immediately loads onto your laptop screen? I figured that's what you meant. Get a really long Firewire cable and some software - I have EOS Utility send everything to a watched folder for Capture One. quote:What does other software do better? I mean, it loads thumbnails, shows previews, displays EXIF, lists folders, allows you to run batch processes and actions created in Photoshop (love this), it filters results by ratings or labels (standard) and it works all the time.= What does Bridge do that Lightroom doesn't do better/faster/easier/more streamlined? Nothing. Bridge was good before Finder and all that poo poo had decent image/RAW support but now it's just a giant kludge of features added on at random in a desperate attempt to make it useful. Lightroom was basically built in response to how lovely Bridge is for your workflow. I'll admit I haven't used the CS4 version yet but if you still use Bridge go get Lightroom and use it for a while, the benefits are obvious. I haven't seen a need to even open Bridge in a looooong time.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2009 03:11
|
|
|
For retouching (including skin) I tend to use the patch tool and only go in with clone if there is something large or major that needs to be fixed. The clone tool is pretty drastic and if you overuse it it starts looking artificial real quick. I usually go in this order: -healing brush for small blemishes that you can just click -patch tool for everything minor where you need more control than the healing brush -clone tool to roughly do anything slightly complicated and then go in and finesse it and clean up with the patch tool edit: and yeah learn the shortcut keys, it makes you like 10x faster j = patch s = clone b = brush d = default black/white color palette x = switch background/foreground | = toggle mask view number keys = opacity brad industry fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jan 18, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2009 04:51
|
|
|
I also use these a lot in addition to zoom in/out so I can see what I'm doing quickly: h - hand tool tab = show/hide toolbars and menus f = change view mode (press 3 times to get nothing but the image on the screen)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2009 05:20
|
|
|
I would just merge them manually if you don't want to shell out for more software. You get more control that way anyways so you don't end up in OMGCOLORZZZZ territory.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2009 22:21
|
|
|
It's better to do it in RAW because RAW is taking your changes and applying them to the data straight from the camera. Once you process the RAW file then you are manipulating actual pixels, not how the information is interpreted. I generally do as much overall changes in RAW to get a good "base" image to work with in PS. Once in Photoshop I pretty much only do local adjustments or retouching (compositing/Liquify/etc.)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2009 21:59
|
|
|
You can correct perspective with transform, but not with the straighten tool.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2009 00:00
|
|
|
Just brush on the mask. Use "|" to see what you're doing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2009 22:27
|
|
|
Making a mask is the digital equivalent of coloring inside the lines. Unless you are Michael J Fox just turn the hardness down and take 2 seconds and do it really rough, no one can tell if it isn't perfect it just has to be close.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2009 22:38
|
|
|
^ It all depends on how you have your system and workflow calibrated. Without that no one can guess what it will look like printed. I mean if your monitor isn't calibrated you don't even know if you are seeing the color you think you want, much less what it will look like when you send it to print.Toupee posted:Stolen from here Those descriptions are kind of needlessly complicated. The only ones I use on a regular basis when retouching are: Color - I use this a lot on Hue/Saturation adjustment layers. It lets you just change the color without affecting density. Saturation/Hue modes are similar. It just narrows the scope of your adjustment, ie. if you want to take the orange out of someones skin tone without affecting the tonality. Luminosity - Lets you change the density and contrast without affecting the color or saturation. This is extremely useful on curves adjustments (especially now with the targeted adjustment tool) because you can gently caress with the curve a lot to get whatever contrast you want without sending your color into LSD territory.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2009 19:40
|
|
|
Just mimic the color palette of whatever film you like. Lightroom gives you such a ridiculous amount of control over color it is pretty easy to get that look, assuming you can recognize what it is you are going for.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2009 07:22
|
|
|
I tend to think photography is a pretty broad medium, you can't just lump poo poo you don't like in with painting. edit: sorry that was kind of snarky... Before photography was invented all painters did was poo poo like portraits and other boring commissions. After photography, they all lost their jobs. A lot of people thought photography had killed painting, but what it really did was free painters to do whatever the gently caress they wanted. Look at the Western tradition in painting... it is pretty boring up until photography is invented, then there is a massive explosion in different kinds of work starting with the birth of modernism (Cubism/Picasso). Now basically anything that someone says is a painting is a painting regardless of whether it even hangs on a wall or uses paint. Same poo poo is happening to photography right now because of digital capture. brad industry fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Feb 9, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2009 04:43
|
|
|
Use a hardware calibrator on your monitor and have custom ICC profiles made for your printer. Anything else is just blindly guessing. All my devices are calibrated and I can go from screen to perfect print in 1-2 proofs. If you aren't anal like me it's basically WYSIWYG. brad industry fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Feb 16, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2009 04:03
|
|
|
Go to a pro lab. Often they will proof it for you or you can bring in a sample for them to match. If you don't do that they will at the very least give you the ICC profiles for their devices so you can soft-proof at home. Or buy your own printer and calibrate it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2009 21:15
|
|
|
Nice tip, that website is awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2009 06:21
|
|
|
cLin posted:I'm a bit confused with profiles and such. What would I use that website listed above for? I noticed they linked profiles, is that something I give them or I would use on my computer? Google "soft proofing". quazi posted:The Epson 9900 is pretty nice. I have an R1800 (now replaced by the R1900) and love it. FAR better quality than any digital lab, and as good or better than any pro one since you can sit and tweak your prints all you want. If you get your own printer get custom ICC profiles, the difference is night and day. RangerScum posted:I don't know if I am just lucky or what, but I have never had any calibration done to my monitor, and I just upload my photos to adorama.com and checkmark the box where they correct the colors and so far all my photos have come with the correct colors. I think you are just not all that picky. I have never sent anything out and been 100% happy with how it looked when it came back and I do calibrate. Even when I get high-end prints made at pro labs I have to bring in a sample to match or get proofs to get something I think is acceptable. Studying printmaking in school made me anal as gently caress 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2009 19:47
|
|
|
I use a Curves adjustment layer. You can do it with Levels or Color Balance. Really there are a lot of ways to correct color in PS.. pick one you like and figure out how to get good at it. You do get a lot more control in PS over LR.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2009 02:41
|
|
|
In LR I would just eye dropper that green and desaturate it / shift it more toward reality.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2009 21:13
|
|
|
To keep this LR specific, I would go with a Mac simply because it is easier to manage multiple displays in OS X whereas in Windows it is kind of a nightmare and you always have to deal with driver issues and the loving godawful color management. LR has a ton of awesome multiple display features and they are far easier to manage in OS X.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 01:55
|
|
|
Cythrelo posted:With Vista, it's extremely easy. I've used Vista with both ATI and nVidia cards, and setting up multiple displays is as simple as plugging them in and setting it to extend your desktop across both displays. Not only that, but unless there's an issue with it that I don't know about, color management works just fine with multiple monitors. You calibrate all your displays individually and have profiles for each? And it all works as advertised? Because every single PC user I know (which I will admit is not that many) has bitched and moaned about Vista's color management and driver problems similar to what FunkyJunk said. I don't care what OS people use and I hate to sound like a Mac commercial, but I have never even had to think about color management on a Mac and it seems every time I have to use a PC it's a constant battle to make the drat thing do what it should. I know Macs are more expensive, but I think it is definitely worth it if you are serious about photo editing and are doing anything color critical. If price is the only consideration then yeah, save your cash and get a PC. edit: and just for the  factor - I have a friend who is a digital tech and her rates are higher if she knows there will be PCs on set.
brad industry fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Mar 4, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 05:58
|
|
|
There's not really much to monitor profiles. You basically just run the Huey software and it will calibrate everything, make an ICC profile, and then assign it to the device for you. Just run the software every 2 weeks or so and you'll be good, it's pretty simple. friendship waffle was being a moron because he did not understand the difference between a device profile (which is what the Huey makes or what you get when you profile your printer) and a generic colorspace one that your files are in (like sRGB or Adobe RGB).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 19:37
|
|
|
No, it doesn't matter what profiles your files are in or what settings your software is using. Think of device profiles as kind of a last-step filter, it is just adjusting the output from your software to compensate for how your specific monitor shows color. (This is the best analogy I can come up with:) It's kind of like if you have speakers that are really treble heavy you can use an equalizer to balance it out, regardless of what the source is it all gets filtered before being output.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 20:03
|
|
|
^ Yep. Profiles like sRGB or Adobe RGB or whatever are device agnostic, they just describe a colorspace. Device profiles take into account the specific physical properties and capabilities of whatever your image is being output on and interpret (transform) your files through that. I think I read about some monitor that can do 98% of the Adobe RGB gamut, but regardless you'd still have to calibrate and use a custom device profile on it. Mannequin posted:Yeah, friendship waffle is gone from CC for good as far as I know. I actually asked him to come back because I thought he had good things to say about gear recommendations and things of that sort, but he essentially said it wasn't worth the bother since everything turned into bickering. He was just straight up wrong though and wanted to argue ad nausem regardless of how much detail I went into explaining how it actually worked. Maybe we should buy him a copy of Real World Color Management (which is a great book BTW) and send him a sorry-we-hurt-your-feelings note. I just thought it was kind of ridiculous that he was always playing the "hurf durf I am always right because I'm a pro" card but refused to ever post a single image of his own. Even in college my professors would show us their work, how else would you know what perspective someone is coming from? edit: actually I post on another photo forum where you get banned if you don't link to your portfolio brad industry fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Mar 4, 2009 |
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 21:37
|
|
|
Speaking of LAB color, I highly recommend this book: http://bit.ly/SNrFi
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2009 22:57
|
|
|
evensevenone posted:'spose this is the best place to ask this: No it won't. Just open the catalog file and you should be good to go. You might need to tell LR to look at the new drive letter but it's not going to have to rebuild the catalog or anything like that. You won't lose anything.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2009 23:28
|
|
|
The Fomo posted:What's the best way of emulating a particular film's colorspace in Photoshop? I've been looking to reduce the "digital" look of my photos lately but I have no idea how to approach that problem other than actually shooting film. There are no shortcuts, don't bother with presets. The best way to do it is in your RAW processor. You are just going to have to spend a lot of time in the H/S/L dialog, but of course this requires that you can recognize what it is you like about whatever film you are trying to recreate. Subtle split toning also goes a long way. Molten Llama posted:Print profiling's pretty much X-Rite or bust. I agree that those X-Rites are pretty much the standard, that is what I used and it did a beautiful job on the 70ish papers I profiled. I disagree that the canned profiles are any good though, calibrating for your specific setup makes a MASSIVE difference. If you are happy with the canned profiles then don't bother obviously, but I encourage everyone to get a custom profile for whatever paper you most commonly use. This all depends on how picky you are with your prints. I wouldn't recommend anyone actually buy a spectro. If you only use a handful of papers there are plenty of places you can send out a target to that will do it for you for cheap (~$20ish). If you are going to calibrate a ton of papers then rent one for a day and churn them out.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2009 20:08
|
|
|
The thing you have to remember is that Dave Hill is carefully lighting his images with whatever processing he does in mind from the beginning. He's not just slapping some sliders around in LR or PS.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2009 02:01
|
|
|
I actually had 2 hard drives fail recently and the only thing I was not able to recover was the actual Lightroom catalog file. I just re-imported my files into a new catalog and all my info was intact, even though the files were on a new drive and I was basically starting from scratch. Lightroom rules.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2009 08:41
|
|
|
In the PS print dialog you basically just select "Let Photoshop Manage Color", pick the appropriate ICC profile from the drop down list, and hit "Print". The driver dialog comes up, you select the correct media type (luster/glossy/matte), turn off all color management, then send it to the printer.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2009 02:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:12 |
|
|
Oh ok, in that case you are going to want to get the profile from the print shop and soft-proof it (just google it for more info than you ever wanted to know). You should be able to reasonably approximate what the print is going to look like on your screen and make adjustments accordingly.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2009 02:31
|
|