Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Faete on June 05, 2011, 07:44:20 am
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I really hope someone can help me because I'm driving myself crazy trying to work out what I've messed up.
I retouch for a number of different photographers. Up until this point I have been using their office space and computers, but now things are changing and I will soon be working from home.
In preparation I went out and bought an Eizo Colour Edge and an i1 to calibrate it with.
I retouched a wedding from home and sent one image of to the local (semi) pro lab just to test. The print had a hideous pink/red cast. Completely unacceptable.
I then looked at the file on the other photographers system - (it's an apple cinema display, calibrated, but out of date. I've never had any colour complaints from it before) and I could see the pink cast on their screen.
I came back home and checked my settings and calibration. The image looks fine (no cast) on both my new setup with Eizo and my calibrated laptop.. BUT only in Lightroom and Photoshop. When I open the image in a web browser, I can see the pink colour cast.
Now I'm completely confused because the image is sRGB - (that's all the lab can print) and being such I was under the impression that there shouldn't be a big difference between PS and a web browser.
I can't soft proof because I work for a number of different photographers and they send their work to different places to be printed and this particular lab does not have profiles for its printers - despite that, most local photographer use that lab. If it was *just* the print that had the cast I would assume it was something their end, but since it shows up pink on the apple display and in a web browser, I can only assume I've done something wrong somewhere.
If anyone can suggest a solution I'd be forever grateful. Attached is the image in question.
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Does the embedded sRGB profile have "Black Point Compensation" enabled? This is important.
The web browser is probably not colour-managed.
The lack of access to a printer profile may be the other big problem. If you can't adjust the image to anticipate the behaviour of their printer/paper combination you have no process control, colour and tone can come out in any which way, and in this situation the only viable recommendation I can think of is to find a lab offering you a profile you can use for soft-proofing. You can install the profile on ANY computer and select it in Photoshop for your final adjustments.
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I downloaded your image, the whites do indeed measure a little reddish.
My advice - start with your system/monitor, by using a reference image, preferably a neutral step wedge. By neutral, I mean in any normal editing workspace (sRGB, Adobe1998, ProPhoto) when R=G=B the area should appear neutral on your display. If it doesn't then something is wrong with your calibration/profiling.
Here's a site with some useful test images - http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/monitor_calibration.htm
And BTW use your eyedropper to check neutral areas within Lightroom/Photoshop, don't be completely dependent upon visual assessment.
Richard Southworth