I am not a master printer, and had no clue who Ctein is. Except for ABW, I had never tried Printer managed color prints. But after reading his article that seems to have some distinguished folks bent out of shape, I gave it a try. I tried printer managed color with Canson Rag Photographique, Canson Arches Aquarelle and Canson BFK Rives. The results have been pleasing. I compared them with prints that I made with profiles supplied by Canson soon after I got my P800. I have to say that the Printer Managed prints looked pretty good to my untrained eye.
What has had some "distinquished folks" (perhaps myself included) bent out of shape is not Ctein's favorable recommendation of a printer manages workflow. It's his resolute opinion that ICC profiles were an epic fail for him in some instances, and never really better in almost every other instance. That conclusion flies in the face of what my own hard fought hard won experience is with an ICC profiled workflow. I'd be the first to tell you a really well calibrated ICC workflow, complete with highly accurate soft proofing is definitely not easy to set up. Unlike what some marketing guys or amateur photography forums will tell you, you don't truly get all the way there to a precise soft proof by taking any old monitor, buying some inexpensive calibrator puck, and using a generic profile provided by some third party media vendor. I wish we could all get there easily following that recipe, and sometimes that recipe works "good enough" for some folks to be happy, but when we are talking about a master printmaker pulling out all stops to work through a sophisticated ICC profiling approach and then reporting it didn't work, yeah, that's when the little antennae in the back of my head start to tell me "what the hell, what happened?". So, I repeated Ctein's exercise with his one of his most troublesome images (Ctein kindly sent me his source file for the Apollo Soyuz image bathed in searchlights under a nighttime sky).
1) I replicated the print he got using his printer manages color/Epson color controls workflow, and I agree it was a very good print.
2), I printed again using PS manages colors and an ICC profile (custom built using PM5 software using the default logo colorful setting). Again, I replicated Ctein's experience. It did not produce an "out of the box" print that was as good as the one created in step 1. Ctein and I totally agree on that score.
3). I then noted that the source file itself has unwanted encoded color errors in the hue constancy of the colors in the night time beams of light, such that some corrective action must be taken to get the print he wants (where the beams of light should trail off uniformly in hue throughout the image). That means the LUT which Epson hardwired into its Epson Color control workflow is doing some error correction in the blue sector of the color space to fix the classic "blue turns purple" problems common to many digital image color reproduction methods. The Epson "fix" just happens to help this particular image in a good way, but may cause errors in others. And on a wide gamut monitor, the aRGB source image definitely does not come close to matching the printer manages color prints. So, let's clear up that misconception right now. Ctein was editing an image in aRGB color space, but looking at his edits on a monitor generically factory calibrated to mimic a native sRGB-like gamut. As such, should it surprise us that Ctein believes soft proofing is not very accurate? Printer manages color did not render a perfect reproduction of the source file, perfectly displayed on his monitor. It was just a method that happened to "play nicely" with this particular image that Ctein printed along with others to test his printer manages color hypothesis.
4). In step 2, I had verified that Xrite ICC default profiles' perceptual and relative rendering tags do in fact exaggerate the color errors of Ctein's Apollo Soyuz source image because Xrite's default profile recipes favor colorfulness at the expense of tonality (i.e. the typical Xrite-built profile favors colorfulness over the preservation of lightness relationships among the various image elements). As such, these profiles were not a good staring point for any subsequent image edits. Because Xrite's default profiling algorithm(s) are so pervasive in the industry, and because Andrew Rodney likely made Ctein a custom profile using said default settingss which Ctein also stated failed to fix his issues, it's fair to say that Ctein does not like ICC profile(s) renderings which favor colorfulness over tonal accuracy. In my own work, I switch between Logo colorful and logo classic frequently, so I'm sympathetic to anyone who finds precise color accuracy lacking in many typical ICC profiles. Xrite and other profile making vendors really need to emphasize these aspects of "color mapping" more in their literature than is typically found.
5. Once I understood what Ctein's ICC profile problem was, namely that one needs to start with a profile that favors the preservation of tonal relationships at the expense of colorfulness. I reached into my "bag of ICC profile tricks' and applied Xrite's original PM5 "logo classic" to soft proof the Apollo Soyuz image on my calibrated high gamut NEC spectraview II display. The softproof showed me that logo classic was providing a much better starting point for final image edits needed to match or exceed Ctein's printer managed color output because log classic favors tonal (lightness) accuracy at the expense of hue and chroma.
6). I applied just two image edits in my carefully calibrated softproofing mode, one hue/sat layer in PS, and one curve correction. Using a sound softproofing workflow as my guide, I was able to make my corrections in a matter of minutes while working on Ctein's source file image.(note: while the edits were few, they were indeed tricky moves on this file, ones that would be very hard pressed to do without accurate soft proofing guiding the effort). When I had completed those edits, I had on screen a soft proofed image I actually thought was superior to the print I made with Ctein's method. Yah, I know, my word against his as to which was a preferable rendition of the source file, but bear in mind, what I liked better, I was seeing on screen, and I was expecting it to print the way I was seeing it on screen. Moreover, with just one more layer, and a couple of trims on the "fill" percentages of the PS layer sliders, I knew I could get really really close to Ctein's preferred "printer manages color" rendition of this image if I wanted to, so I wasn't sacrificing any flexibility in color and tone reproduction and in being able to deliver just what anyone would expect in print from that source file, IMHO, by using an ICC profiled workflow.
7). The resultant print matched my edits very accurately, and because I liked this "interpretation" of the image better than what I got when printed with the "printer manages color workflow" on my P600 printer, I ended up with an ICC profiled print off this file that I liked better as well. Moral of the story: ICC profile managed workflows are not inferior to printer manages color as Ctein seems to assert, but you do have to understand ICC profiling strengths and weaknesses very well. Indeed, when done properly, soft proofing with the right ICC profile rendering recipe gets you where you want to go and also tells you very closely what to expect in the final print. My faith in my ICC profiling workflow and all those years I have spent mastering it was restored after completing this little exercise
.
All that said, for many folks who don't want to take on all the overhead of a sophisticated ICC custom profile workflow, Ctein has done you a favor, and I admire him for telling us about his personal approach to digital printmaking. Just Use printer manages color with a newer Epson printer, and you probably will get pleasing prints without investing nearly the effort I and others have made in exacting ICC profiled workflows over the years. However, if you are willing to invest the time and take on the steep learning curve of a sophisticated soft proofing environment, you will indeed be rewarded by a richly deserved wysisyg image editing methodology that is extensible to all printers not just Epson printers, and even ones at remote sites not just in your immediate reach.
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com