Many of us who follow Luminous Landscape are professional photographers, and typically our work is reproduced in some printed form. Therefore it’s important that we work in tandem with the separators and printers who reproduce our work.
When digital files replaced transparencies, the color separation industry made it clear that the photographer is responsible for furnishing RGB files that can be reproduced. The brightest and darkest areas must hold information. The capture end points of 0-255 that photographers typically shoot don’t necessarily fit in that category.
Quoting the Flexcolor manual 4.0, “printers often request that images be prepared to lie within certain limits,” meaning the extremes of 0-255 must be reduced (i.e. 5-250) during export. Using Flexcolor’s dot tab (in user settings) does an excellent job of this. Capture One also does an outstanding job with Custom Target Levels.
It’s quite a shock to see and understand why the current version of Phocus (v1.1.2) has eliminated this capability.
Some suggest to reduce the end points using pixel-based software (i.e. Photoshop, etc). Quoting the Capture One 4.0 manual, “with conventional pixel based image tools, output levels are used to compress the tonal range of the image to fit in a smaller space, for example re-mapping highlight values of 255 to 245. Whilst this prevents clipping, it means that there is a sharp cut-off of image data, leading to a hard transition between data and no data when the image is re-opened”.
Simply stated, “after the fact” manipulation produces inferior results and doubles workflow.
It’s critical that we maintain end point control when exporting our raw files. Let’s hope that the next release of Phocus returns to the refined level of end point control.
