Lightroom color management for newbies

[hjulenissen]

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/1.0/help.html?content=WS0F7BFFFA-CE53-4ceb-B3D3-9D6256B8917D.html
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=c00294087
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/colour_management/prints_too_dark.html

I have lightroom 3.2, a Dell 20" lcd and a HP printer plus a Spyder 3 express. I want predictable colors. What do I do? :-)

I have gone through the calibration procedure of my display. Frankly I saw nearly no difference between "before" and "after".

Various lightroom articles seems to suggest that color management in lightroom demands no user intervention. That may be, but my prints does not look anything like what I see on screen. It is darker and more yellow cast. As I use my screen for white-balance etc, I depend on things being correctly "referenced".

Am I right that:
1. My camera grabs raw images according to whatever limitations its sensor has, and the fact that lightroom can open its raw files suggests that Adobe (or some Canon driver) provides the ICC profile or equivalent of my camera?
2. The ICC profile of my display is now available for any application in my system, and Lightroom should use it somehow for rendering images to screen
3. When I print from Lightroom I have the choice between letting printer drivers or application do printer color management. This suggests that Lightroom finds some (HP-supplied) standard profile for this printer?

So it seems that Lightroom has all that it needs to make a reasonable color-consistent pipeline. Where does it fail? Am I really requesting "soft-proofing"? I use a lot of time and energy making my pictures look natural to me, how do I know that this effort will not be worthless on other displays and other printers

-h

[NikoJorj]

1. My camera grabs raw images according to whatever limitations its sensor has, and the fact that lightroom can open its raw files suggests that Adobe (or some Canon driver) provides the ICC profile or equivalent of my camera?

It's actually a tad more comoplicated, but the idea is there : LR has a way to interpret the RGB colors from the camera sensor.

2. The ICC profile of my display is now available for any application in my system, and Lightroom should use it somehow for rendering images to screen

So far so good... as long as you calibrated your display to something corresponding to the way you're viewing your prints, and alas the S3express software doesn't allow for such a basic need.
Low luminance is generally needed to match screen and print brightnesses, it just depends on your setting but an interval of 90-130cd/m² shouldn't be that wrong. It is generally quite low on the brightness scale of the screen OSD.
Color temperature is a more complicated issue, better let it around the native one of your screen because the eye does a better job at this than the screen. Not very far from 6500K, normally.
Try DispCalGUI eg, or the demos of ColorEyesDisplayPro or BasicColor Display, to set those.

3. When I print from Lightroom I have the choice between letting printer drivers or application do printer color management. This suggests that Lightroom finds some (HP-supplied) standard profile for this printer?

LR is reliable, and so it generally avoids to guess and relies on what you're telling it.
The more reliable way to set this is to let LR handle color management, by indicating yourself which is the correct ICC profile for what you're printing on. In the driver, disable anything resembling to actual color management with named profiles, "print enhancement", "color correction" or the like : the good setting might be called "ICM color management".

[hjulenissen]

Thank you for your reply

So far so good... as long as you calibrated your display to something corresponding to the way you're viewing your prints, and alas the S3express software doesn't allow for such a basic need.

But isnt the Spyder about characterizing the device, ie generating an ICC profile? Isnt it up to the application what to do with this knowledge?

Low luminance is generally needed to match screen and print brightnesses, it just depends on your setting but an interval of 90-130cd/m² shouldn't be that wrong. It is generally quite low on the brightness scale of the screen OSD.

Yes, evidently.

Color temperature is a more complicated issue, better let it around the native one of your screen because the eye does a better job at this than the screen. Not very far from 6500K, normally.

I dont understand. When I do white-balance by eye, I am essentially changing the color temperature, am I not? How can I trust my eyes to do that task if I am to "normalize away" color temperature "errors" of my display?

Try DispCalGUI eg, or the demos of ColorEyesDisplayPro or BasicColor Display, to set those.
LR is reliable, and so it generally avoids to guess and relies on what you're telling it.
The more reliable way to set this is to let LR handle color management, by indicating yourself which is the correct ICC profile for what you're printing on. In the driver, disable anything resembling to actual color management with named profiles, "print enhancement", "color correction" or the like : the good setting might be called "ICM color management".

Will check those applications and trust Lightroom to do as much as possible.

Ideally, I would want an image pipeline that tried to recreate perceptually what I would have seen in the original scene, on display and on paper. AFAIK, Lightroom should be able to do this as long as:
1. My display ICC is correct
2. The camera "ICC" is correct
3. The printer ICC is correct (wherever it came from).

Of course, limitations in measurements and limitations in the physical gamut of each device + noise/quantization may mean that this ideal can never be accomplished, but some clever color engine inside lightroom should be able to do a "best effort" mapping, minimizing absolute error and artifacts? If this is Lightrooms ambitions, then display and print should look perceptually farily similar, but it does not. So where is my logic flawed?

-k

[stamper]

Quote

I dont understand. When I do white-balance by eye, I am essentially changing the color temperature, am I not? How can I trust my eyes to do that task if I am to "normalize away" color temperature "errors" of my display?

Unquote

It is all about trusting your eyes. They aren't errors, it is a matter of taste what colour casts ( this is what white balance is all about ) you want in your image. You very rarely want a neutral image. Looking for perfection will frustrate you no end. What you should be looking for is something that is a reasonable likeness to what you saw and an artistic input by yourself. Remember nobody saw the scene other yourself so you don't need to replicate it exactly, and you can't do it anyway.

[hjulenissen]

It is all about trusting your eyes. They aren't errors, it is a matter of taste what colour casts ( this is what white balance is all about ) you want in your image. You very rarely want a neutral image. Looking for perfection will frustrate you no end. What you should be looking for is something that is a reasonable likeness to what you saw and an artistic input by yourself. Remember nobody saw the scene other yourself so you don't need to replicate it exactly, and you can't do it anyway.

But if I am wearing red glasses then I cannot trust my eyes. If my monitor does not reproduce colors against some standard, then all of my efforts to make stuff look "good" on display is a waste of time when I do print, or when I change the monitor.

-k

[NikoJorj]

But isnt the Spyder about characterizing the device, ie generating an ICC profile?

Two steps involved :
- first, setting the device in a convenient and reproductible state, ie calibrating,
- second, characterizing the device in this state with measurements, to build an ICC profile.

If you haven't already, read this book : it's quite easy, and yet comprehensive on the subject.

When I do white-balance by eye, I am essentially changing the color temperature, am I not? How can I trust my eyes to do that task if I am to "normalize away" color temperature "errors" of my display?

From what I try to understand, your eye assumes a neutral reference mixing the white or grey parts of the screen, the mean colors of it and some surrounding light.
The thing about the mean color is that when you change too much the neutrality of the screen, its color response is so biased that the eye can't take it as neutral anymore : the correction is more efficiently done by the eye itself.
And if you wear red glasses long enough, your vision will adapt and you may see colors not very differently from without glasses after a while.

But generally, the main rule for calibrating a display to a convenient state is to try and see what works.

Ideally, I would want an image pipeline that tried to recreate perceptually what I would have seen in the original scene, on display and on paper.

No you don't!  The original scene has to be rendered, ie compressed tone-wise and color-wise, to be decently represented on a display, and even more on paper.

But I'm playing with words here, and I agree that :

AFAIK, Lightroom should be able to do this as long as:
1. My display ICC is correct
2. The camera "ICC" is correct
3. The printer ICC is correct (wherever it came from).

The problem may reside in characterizing the display so that it matches visually your viewing environment, and mostly characterizing the printer driver so that it doesn't apply any correction behind your back (as LR cares all about it).

[hjulenissen]

From what I try to understand, your eye assumes a neutral reference mixing the white or grey parts of the screen, the mean colors of it and some surrounding light.
The thing about the mean color is that when you change too much the neutrality of the screen, its color response is so biased that the eye can't take it as neutral anymore : the correction is more efficiently done by the eye itself.
And if you wear red glasses long enough, your vision will adapt and you may see colors not very differently from without glasses after a while.

I agree that the brain adjusts itself to color temperature. I am sceptic that it does this fast enough to adjust to my screen after doing whatever I did before. And if it did, how could I ever trust my adjustements to white-balance in my images (stare long enough at a picture and its white-balance seems right no matter what)

No you don't!   The original scene has to be rendered, ie compressed tone-wise and color-wise, to be decently represented on a display, and even more on paper.

I would like a perceptually neutral image pipeline. Of course, there will be dynamic range limits, like there will be gamut limits and resolution limits. In these cases, I would like a non-linear mapping that magically made the image appear similar to the scene that I could see, prioritizing the aspects that I find important. Pretty much impossible, yes, but a sensible goal. Tone-mapping is just a question of how to represent highly dynamic content on a low-dynamic display with minimum perceptual "distortion".

-h

[eliedinur]

3. When I print from Lightroom I have the choice between letting printer drivers or application do printer color management. This suggests that Lightroom finds some (HP-supplied) standard profile for this printer?

This is a basic mistake that nobody seems to have picked up on. LR does not automatically find the proper printer profile all by itself. How could it possibly? Printer profiles are specific for the combination of printer model and paper type, how can LR know what paper you are using? You have to set the proper profile manually at the bottom of the right side panel in the Print module. Click on the double arrows at the right end of the line that starts Profile:... and in the pop-up box select Other. This will take you to your operating system's ICC profile folder. Chances are your printer driver deposited a bunch of HP profiles there, select the one that is appropriate for your paper. If you don't have the profiles, see if you can download them from HP.

[eronald]

3. When I print from Lightroom I have the choice between letting printer drivers or application do printer color management. This suggests that Lightroom finds some (HP-supplied) standard profile for this printer?

This is Mac jargon. Application color management means the Mac is supposed to move out of the way, and LR converts the colors according to a printer profile which yo specify and sends  converted data untouched to the printer. Printer color management means (is supposed to mean) that LR sends data to the printer in a standard colorspace which the system recognizes, eg sRGB, and the printer knows how to print sRGB data.

Whether the above actually works as described in various applications is a different issue. When fully debugged, the printing pipeline will work that way, and everyone at Apple, Adobe, Epson, HP etc seem to be trying very hard to make that happen, now that they have realized it is problematic.

I would expect "Printer color management" to work best at the moment with various apps, eg. Photoshop, provided you have a recent printer driver.

Edmund
 

[hjulenissen]

...You have to set the proper profile manually at the bottom of the right side panel in the Print module. Click on the double arrows at the right end of the line that starts Profile:... and in the pop-up box select Other. This will take you to your operating system's ICC profile folder. Chances are your printer driver deposited a bunch of HP profiles there, select the one that is appropriate for your paper. If you don't have the profiles, see if you can download them from HP.

Problem is, it is empty (only display profiles). It does not seem that the HP driver installs a single ICC profile on my system.

I have spent a few days searching the HP website and googling, the only clue I found was some user complaining that he lost all profiles when upgrading from XP to Windows 7.

Ahh, the pain :-)

-h

[Wayne Fox]

This is Mac jargon. Application color management means the Mac is supposed to move out of the way, and LR converts the colors according to a printer profile which yo specify and sends  converted data untouched to the printer. Printer color management means (is supposed to mean) that LR sends data to the printer in a standard colorspace which the system recognizes, eg sRGB, and the printer knows how to print sRGB data.

Whether the above actually works as described in various applications is a different issue. When fully debugged, the printing pipeline will work that way, and everyone at Apple, Adobe, Epson, HP etc seem to be trying very hard to make that happen, now that they have realized it is problematic.

I would expect "Printer color management" to work best at the moment with various apps, eg. Photoshop, provided you have a recent printer driver.

Edmund
 

I'm not sure where you are getting this from, but normal color managed workflow on the Mac has never been problematic.  Letting the printer manage color is a complete mistake.  If the application sends tagged converted data to the printer driver, the OS does not interject itself and modify the data.

While printing unmanaged documents requires a simple workaround, this is a case where you don't want the application, the OS, or the printer to get involved in any color transforms, and is something few people need. 

If printing from LR as the OP discussed, using a calibrated display and selecting the correct output profile should yield very good results, especially on photo black papers.  I would caution that if "white" point is critical and you want the white point of the print to match the display, you may very likely have to calibrate the display to a different WP than the standard 6500.   For me personally setting luminosity and white point is based on output, once a match is achieved then the display will offer a much better way to evaluate the output from the printer.  At this point in color management the only user variables are when creating the display profile, so sometimes you have to vary those to achieve a decent match.

[digitaldog]

I would expect "Printer color management" to work best at the moment with various apps, eg. Photoshop, provided you have a recent printer driver.

Maybe that’s a typo and you mean Application Manages Color because that’s the route that consistently works best. Printer Manages Color is supposed to work well too, and can when the OS, Print Driver and Application all work correctly but that’s a big if that usually isn’t the case.

[hjulenissen]

While printing unmanaged documents requires a simple workaround, this is a case where you don't want the application, the OS, or the printer to get involved in any color transforms, and is something few people need. 

Right now I am doing "printer managed" and SRGB. Simply because I could not figure out the alternatives.

If printing from LR as the OP discussed, using a calibrated display and selecting the correct output profile should yield very good results, especially on photo black papers.  I would caution that if "white" point is critical and you want the white point of the print to match the display, you may very likely have to calibrate the display to a different WP than the standard 6500.   For me personally setting luminosity and white point is based on output, once a match is achieved then the display will offer a much better way to evaluate the output from the printer.  At this point in color management the only user variables are when creating the display profile, so sometimes you have to vary those to achieve a decent match.

I have calibrated my display for 5500K. I did not reduce brightness, so my display is considerable brighter than my prints. I am considering having both:

• D65 with high brightness for regular use, and
• 5500K with low brightness as a crude "softproofing".

What do you think about that? I think that DispCalGui will let me switch between those two profiles sort of easily without having to touch the display. I would of course loose some precision when doing source-based brightness reduction, but I'll see if it is worth it.

The main problem right now is that Lightroom sees no printer profiles, so I cannot use Application managed colors.

-h

[JRSmit]

Problem is, it is empty (only display profiles). It does not seem that the HP driver installs a single ICC profile on my system.

I have spent a few days searching the HP website and googling, the only clue I found was some user complaining that he lost all profiles when upgrading from XP to Windows 7.

Ahh, the pain :-)

-h

Niormally, when installing your HP printer software it also installs icc (icm) profiles. Besides that there is a sie to find profiles:
http://h10088.www1.hp.com/cda/gap/display/main/index.jsp?zn=gap&cp=20000-13698-16022-14163^159807_4041_100

This is for a B9180, which is one of my printers.
So depending on your printer it must be possible to find profiles, unless your printer is not meant to be used for printing photos.

[hjulenissen]

Niormally, when installing your HP printer software it also installs icc (icm) profiles. Besides that there is a sie to find profiles:
http://h10088.www1.hp.com/cda/gap/display/main/index.jsp?zn=gap&cp=20000-13698-16022-14163^159807_4041_100

This is for a B9180, which is one of my printers.
So depending on your printer it must be possible to find profiles, unless your printer is not meant to be used for printing photos.

Thank you (your link did not work in my browser btw).

Spent some time on an expensive HP customer support phone line.

Turns out that:
1. Windows 7 changed the color profile system from earlier OS-es
2. The Photosmart C5180 (2008) is an old/unsupported product that is not very photo-oriented
3. There are no, and will never be any HP profiles for this printer under Windows 7

So then my options are:
1. Do printer managed colors (sRGB/ARGB)
2. Purchase paper calibrator/pre-made profiles
3. Purchase a proper photo printer

I will do 1) for the time being.

-h

[eliedinur]

Custom profiles are not expensive, $25-30. Eric Chan, an LL stalwart and Adobe designer, does custom paper/printer profiles for pocket change in his spare time. Google his site.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Custom profiles are not expensive, $25-30. Eric Chan, an LL stalwart and Adobe designer, does custom paper/printer profiles for pocket change in his spare time. Google his site.

I second the recommendation for Eric Chan. He made some excellent profiles for me, very quickly and at very reasonable cost.

Eric M.