Print Profiles and Colour Management

I think I am in danger of over thinking all of this but it would be an understatement to say I wish I’d never heard of print profiles and colour management.  This all came up way too far into my project to be useful.  New knowledge actually ended up creating panic, more work and a lot of stress.

In the past I have used my own printer for final project work.  It’s an Epson Ultra Chrome R2400.  Great for colour and black and white prints but especially good for black and whites. 

I suppose the issues really started when I decided to present my work as large scale layouts.  My printer doesn’t print beyond A3 so I looked around for an outside printer to use.  Loxley Colour was the obvious one for me as I’d seen a lot of their work at trade shows and was impressed with their results.

Bearing in mind all my test prints had been done on my home printer I had all the results that I wanted already worked out. By the end of April I was in good shape and ready to make some decisions on size, layout etc.

That’s when I got into trouble.  I followed the instructions on the Loxley website, downloaded the print profiles and made sure that the colour management suggestions were adhered to in colour settings in Photoshop.  In my case this went from ‘preserve embedded profiles’ to ‘convert to RGB’ and from ‘Gamma 2.2’ to ‘Dot Gain 20%’.  All my images had been converted in RAW to black and white producing Gamma 2.2 embeded images.  Had I been working in colour the images would have entered photoshop untagged they would then have taken on whatever profiles I had set photoshop to work with.  Confused?  I was.  So the moment they entered photoshop for further manipulation my black and white images were converted to Dot Gain 20%.  Why?  Did it change anything in terms of quality? Aparently this is the default workspace for most inkjet printers, Loxley included and reputedly best for density, contrast and shadow separation.  The output result from these changes were images that were completely different to those from my own printer in terms of tone and detail and they were extremely dark.

Where do I go from here?  I spent a weekend agonising about what to do.  I tried changing the printer settings, lightening the images in levels.  Nothing seemed to work and I wasted a lot of printer paper and ink.  If I’d been married it would have been divorce.  I’m prepared to admit to being hard to live with for the duration of this problem.  It doesn’t help that this side of photography doesn’t interest me in the slightest.  I’m probably what you’d call technically challenged.

Anyway, to move on.  My test prints from Loxley came back and the problem with dark images was repeated.  I eventually spoke to someone useful at Loxley and whilst I had an image on screen he looked at the same image on his calibrated monitor.  Basically his instruction was to increase the midtone values in levels in photoshop by around 0.5 (it took a little bit of playing around with each image to hit the right amount) and then to increase the contrast to compensate.  On my own printer I turned off ‘printer management’ and turned on ‘photoshop management,’ set printer settings to ‘Epson premium glossy paper’ and the resulting images were much closer to the Loxley versions.

The next set of test prints from Loxley came back much better.

Before

After

Having said all that, I spent an awful lot of extra time on each image as a result of these new profiles but I’m not sure I can say that the moral of the story is that I need to know what printer I am going to use before I start working on my images because I don’t think I will always know that information so far in advance. 

New Work flow

(based on Loxley profiles)

Convert images in RAW process

Save as PSD

Open untagged images in photoshop (RGB profile will embed at this stage)

Convert to black and White (Dot Gain 20%)

Manipulate

Resize

Sharpen