Color Management with scanner and agency

[Diapositivo]

Hallo everybody,
this is my first post here. The site is gorgeous and I wanted to try the forum for a "beginner question" I have, and not a short one.
I have recently bought a scanner (Nikon SC 5000 ED) with which I am scanning slides to propose to stock agencies. I don't know yet who will get my pictures so I cannot talk to a person in particular now to ask him how should I setup my system. On the other hand I am doing the scanning work now and I would like not to do it several times.

My question regards color management for guys who, like me, are not going to print themselves but are going to give files to somebody for him to print.
I have found many detailed explanation (on internet and also on this site) but they all relate to CM for people who print their pictures themselves. My case is different as I give pictures to somebody who might eventually one day print them.
That should make things easier, I thought.

The ingredients of my recipe, which I have laid down, are as follows:
Agencies want color space "RGB Adobe 1998". OK that sounds easy.
I have used "Adobe Gamma" and obtained a profile file for my monitor (OK I should use a hardware device for optimal results, let's say for the moment I simply have this file, which we call "monitor profile").
I did not calibrate my scanner with a specific device, but I have a factory made "profile" file, which we call "scanner profile", written on disk at setup time, and for the time being this will also be acceptable.
My system (Windows XP) is instructed to use my monitor profile by loading Adobe Gamma at startup (and I can see it being loaded on startup, the appearance changes).

I now have to cook all this into my scanner program (Nikon Scan 4) and Photoshop CS2.
Let's see Nikon Scan first, which looks easier to configure.
In Preferences / Color Management I have ticked on "Use Nikon Color Management system". I have 3 sections to compile:
Monitor: I have chosen "Use custom monitor profile" and passed my monitor profile location;
RGB: Color space where I chose "Adobe RGB (1998)";
CMYK: I have left "Use factory default CMYK profile". As I have no intention to print myself, I suppose this option is irrelevant to me.

So far so good, I suppose operating system and Nikon Scan are configured properly (if we disregard the fact that the profile files are a bit approximated). Nowhere I am asked to indicate where the factory profile of the scanner is, or where should be a profile obtained with an hardware device.

Photoshop CS2 is the cause of some difficulties.

It gives me a menu item "Edit / Color settings" for the program itself. The Help was of No Great Help to me.
In Edit / Color settings I have, under "Monitor color", several parameters to configure.

Working Space:

RGB: I chose "Monitor RGB - Adobe RGB (1998)". I don't know how this would be different from "Adobe RGB (1998)" which is another alternative.
CMYK: I don't intend to print. I have inserted here US Web Coated (SWOP) v2. I though it was irrelevant. It is not, PS tries to simulate the printer rendering on screen ("softproof"). I scanned, worked on and saved many images with this setup. If I change it now, and load an image, PS complains and asks me what should it do. If I load another profile (e.g. Europe ISO coated...) colors on screen change. Aarrggh. Yes of course they do as PS is simulating on screen how would appear those colors on print. That is all what colour management is about. Nonetheless I am puzzled. I wonder whether I should be conscious about this setup. Ultimately I do base color corrections, levels etc. on what I see on screen! If this setup changes what I see on screen, than I should not just ignore it. The guys who will observe my images in his agency will have his system setup with some sort of "softproof". He will simulate something, some colorspace for printing, I guess. And so if we have two different profiles here, we see two different things.
I will ignore "Gray" and "Spot" and go to the next section:

Color Management Policies:

I have three "OFF" here, because I understand that if I use OFF PS uses the embedded profiles it finds on the images. I have "Profile mismatch: ask when opening" turned ON and in fact PS complains if I change setup in the section above, e.g. Working space - CMYK - US web coated...

Let's go to the third section

Conversion Options:

I suppose this is totally irrelevant to me because I am opening my scans, which Nikon Scans has already written in the RGB Adobe (1998) colorspace, so I should never do any color space conversion with my workflow, nor would people in the agency, everybody maintains the RGB Adobe (1998) colorspace (until maybe making a version optimized for the web).

If I now load a file in Photoshop, and choose the menu item: Edit / Assign profile for this image, I find already setup the third choice: Profile (from a menu it is chosen "Nikon Adobe RGB 4.0.0.3000"). What's this? Where does it come from? It is probably information extracted by the scanner profile. The other two options are: "Don't color manage this document" (which is not what I want) and "Working RGB: Adobe RGB (1998)". I am obviously in doubt. Should I find that "Adobe RGB (1998)" is the value to choose for this option?

So, for the generous who was patient enough to read until here, my questions are:

Considering I don't have to print but I have to give a "fully colour managed" image to agencies, and that they all work with "RGB Adobe (1998)":

What should I do with the Edit - Color settings - Working Space - CMYK value?

And what should I do with the Edit- Color settings - Working spaces - RGB?

Which is the difference between "Monitor RGB - RGB Adobe (1998)" and "RGB Adobe (1998)"?

Is the rest of my setup valid?

Should I find "Adobe RGB (1998)" on "Edit - Assign profile" when I open my files? In that case, how is it that I don't find it and find "Nikon Adobe RGB 4.0.0.3000" instead?
That looks like the profile in my scanner, not a colorspace (one of the configuration options in my scanner should be the colorspace, yes, but they are different things).

Lastly: should really Adobe Gamma be loaded on system startup? Or should I disactivate startup loading, as Photoshop is going to load the profile anyway, and so the colormanagement might be made "twice", correcting an already corrected appearance on screen?

Thanks for your patience and answer, if any

Fabrizio Ruggeri

[Jonathan Wienke]

Some quick thoughts:

1: A hardware monitor calibration device is mandatory. Period. If you're going to deal with your images printed by other people, you MUST be able to KNOW that your colors are right. And that means hardware calibration. Otherwise if the print is bad, you blame the printer, the printer blames you, and you're both right.

2. Learn the difference between device profiles and editing profiles. Adobe RGB, Nikon RGB, ProPhoto, and sRGB are editing spaces and do not match any actual device. Use them for editing images (I recommend editing images in ProPhoto), but never assign them to monitors, printers, or other actual devices. You have Adobe RGB set as your monitor profile in PS; this is wrong--you need to specify your actual monitor profile for monitor setting, and Adobe RGB or ProPhoto as your RGB working space.

3. Specifying the appropriate monitor profile in Windows and Photoshop's color management settings is not the same as loading the profile into your video card. When you get your hardware calibrator, it will have a loader similar to Adobe Gamma; let it run. Just don't have 2 profile loaders running at the same time (Adobe Gamma and Eye-One Match, for example) or you will be double-profiling and get weird results.

[pfigen]

Take Jonathon's advice and get yourself a hardware calibrator for your screen, but you have to go much farther than that if you're going to produce scans of any decent quality for stock sales. As a commercial advertising photographer who has two drum scanners of my own and also uses a LOT of stock photography for my various clients, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I wouldn't want to use any of your scans. Remember that all sorts of people may be seing them, and critiqueing them and subsequently complaining to the stock agency about them. You need to develop your scanning skills to a professional level before selling them for stock. That takes a lot of practice and knowing exactly what a good scan is and is not. I would find someone in your town who is really good at file prep and have that person look at your scans and give you advice until you've got a better handle on it. Scanning really is an art and it takes years to learn how to do it really well. I'm still getting better after drum scanning for the last eight years - and I thought I was good then.

[juicy]

Hi!

In addition to the other posters answers I would recommend you read a couple of books thoroughly:

"Real world color management" by Fraser, Murphy and Bunting, Peachpit Press
and
"Color management for photographers" by Andrew Rodney, Focal Press

Cheers,
J

[Diapositivo]

Thanks to all for your answers

Thanks also to Jonathan and the other respondents I decided that yes, I don't want to save the money of a hardware calibrator. In the next week or so I will buy a new monitor (Eizo S1921) and a hardware calibrator. I guess after reading the manual all setups will be clearer. (My rationale for not buying a calibrator was that that it would have be sufficient to be in the ballpark, then the printer would have his own monitor - printer calibrated, but I prefer to eliminate any possible issue which might devalue the images).

I can't buy the monitor immediately as I want first to make some tests with a friend's one, but he is very busy with his hospitalized father these days.

Jonathan
I am not sure I understand what you mean when you say:

"You have Adobe RGB set as your monitor profile in PS; this is wrong--you need to specify your actual monitor profile for monitor setting, and Adobe RGB or ProPhoto as your RGB working space."

I suppose you refer to (PS2 configuration): Edit / Color settings / Working spaces / RGB.
This is where I have "Monitor RGB - Adobe RGB (1998)".
One of my problem is understanding how this differs from the plain option "Adobe RGB (1998)".
If I understand you correctly, you mean that I should have "Adobe RGB (1998)" here.

I think I have understood pretty well what and editing space is, only PS configuration is unclear to me, "Adobe RGB (1998)" is my choice because almost 100% of the agency require the images to use this editing space.

Pfigen

I take your advice on scanning very seriously. After buying a new monitor and a calibrator I will post some crops of my scans hoping to obtain some remarks and advice, especially from people like you who knows the particular market I am trying to address.
At the moment frankly I think my scans look pretty decent to me, but I may be overestimating my work. Maybe I will post some crops even before acquiring a new monitor and calibrator, for the curiosity is high. I use a Nikon Super Coolscan LS 5000 ED always with 16 passes, ICE "normal" on, all the rest off, besides adjusting "levels" in the scanner in order to have the entire 16bit space applied to the actual information. I then apply NeatImage immediately, sparingly. Only after that do I proceed to whatever retouching (cleaning of imperfections, levels, maybe contrast mask and so on). Only as a last step I now think I should apply a minimal amount of unsharp mask (things like 50%, 2, 1, on the L channel) not to be told the scan is "soft". Also I don't eliminate entirely the noise for the same reasons ("soft scan").

Thanks again for your help
Fabrizio

[pfigen]

NikonScan is one of the worst scanning applications out there. If you use it in its default configuration, you'll severely clip both your highlights and shadows. You need to dig into the preferences and set the clipping as close to zero as possible. I think it will go down to .01, but it's been awhile since I set up a Nikon for anyone. The next problem is that there is no way possible to create a custom scanner profile for you Nikon when using NikonScan. After speaking with their tech support, I concluded that they are completely clueless - didn't even know what an input profile was. Oh well. You can get decent results from the scanner, but it's not by any means a drum. The other problems you'll run into are the inability to scan the entire frame including the rebate edge. Some agencies want to see 100 percent of the frame. Others don't care. The book recommendations are good for helping to understand digital fundamentals, but only go so far. Don't take them as gospel. The most important thing you can to is to set reasonable highlight and shadow points in your scan, and if there is something obviously neutral, set that as well. Setting the white and black alone will improve most scans immensely and that seems to be lacking in almost every stock agency scan I dealt with. Getty is the worst and PhotoDisc even worse than that. It would be better for you to post full rez compressed tiffs to an ftp site if you want feedback from anyone here.

[Diapositivo]

After a month, I have finally found out how Photoshop makes my monitor profile a possible choice in the working RGB space ("Monitor RGB - myprofile", I never understood why my profile was among a list of color spaces).

If you make a monitor profile with Adobe Gamma, Adobe Gamma asks you if you want your profile in the sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998) color space.

Adobe Gamma does not know how large is the color space "covered" by your monitor.

If you tell it to make a profile for the Adobe RGB (1998) color space, it will make a profile which, when opened with the application "ICC Profile Inspector" (freely downloadable at the ICC web site), shows a green point which is actually quite far apart from the green point in the sRGB space (ICC Profile Inspector traces the graph). That is a monitor profile in the AdobeRGB color space.

When a hardware calibrator tests your monitor and makes a characterization profile, it finds which is the real color space of which the monitor is capable. That will be larger than sRGB but smaller than Adobe RGB. It will be different for each monitor.
That is a monitor profile, in the colorspace which is actually covered by your monitor.

So when you open the profile thus created with "ICC Profile Inspector" you see that the green red and blue point are (depending of how good your monitor is) slightly "larger" than the sRGB values. The better the monitor, the larger the gamut.

This is why Photoshop put this (as "Monitor RGB - yourprofilename") in the color spaces menu. You can choose to have all you see on screen saved on file with values that relates to your monitor color space.

That can be interesting if you print yourself and, for instance, if you have to print a portrait or anything for which you want to control color with extreme precision.

In the AdobeRGB color space, a larger gamut (than in the sRGB space) is represented by the same RGB values, so each atomic difference between colors (let's say the difference between (R100, G130, B100) and (R100, G131, B100) is bigger in the AdobeRGB color space than in the sRGB color space. The first color is different in AdobeRGB than in sRGB. Also the second is different. The point is: the second in the sRGB color space is "nearer" the first in sRGB color space, the two colors in the AdobeRGB space are more visually distant.

(If this concept isn't clear, think that ultimately every RGB color space only has 256 values for each dimension. In the AdobeRGB the Green dimension is noticeably larger than in the sRGB, so the 256 values are further apart between them).

So if you print yourself and you don't want the minimum distance between two shades of skin colour to be the one typical of AdobeRGB, you use your own monitor color space and you enjoy the best of both world: you exploit the maximum gamut of your monitor, and you don't lose the "granularity" of the sRGB color space.

If you just work with the AdobeRGB working space, just because your monitor (or at least mine) is not capable of representing on screen the gamut of AdobeRGB, Photoshop will convert on-the-fly the colors according to the rendering intent specified and so, if my rendering intent is "perceptual", the color shown on screen will NOT be the one that the Agency, or any other person with another monitor, will see, but the general "sense" of the picture will be preserved (if I instead chose the absolute colorimetric intent, I would just "clip" all the colors outside of the colorspace of my monitor, but the colors inside would have not just the same numbers on the graphic card but also the same appearance on the monitor).

Besides, when you save in AdobeRGB (not the color space you were inspecting the picture in) Photoshop reconverts the value in the AdobeRGB color space, and the two shades will be far apart again.

So (to go back to the main theme) for those working with agencies and having the AdobeRGB as the working color space, just because the monitor works in the "myprofile" color space (slightly larger than sRGB for most monitors) the colors shown on screen will not be the ones seen by the agency or the final client, because they will be "perceptually" adjusted to the narrower monitor colorspace.

Nonetheless the configuration to adopt is "Adobe RGB (1998)" as RGB working space.

Ciao
Fabrizio