Color Profiles

Greetings All,,,Anyone out there using "color profiles" ???....good/bad results ???...My experimentation is causing me to lean in the forgeddabout it direction...Regards,,,Tad

I'm more of the "forgeddabout it" persuasion.

Color profiles only seem meaningful to people doing 4(+) color process printing. And even then, I have been most persuaded by my copy of Dan Margulius' book, Professional Photoshop

If you've never browsed that book, it shows excellent detail about the basic truths about adjusting the CMYK of photos to correct colors.

And as proof that his "correcting color by-the-numbers" system works he showed 4 pictures he had corrected in advance... ones he had done before his student (someone with no previous experience with photoshop or color work) learned and applied these lessons to the same original photos. Later in that chapter, you find out that the pupil was "red and green color blind".

While all of those pictures color corrected by the color blind pupil looked good, one of the four, was absolutely fabulous -- crisp, clear, detailed, beautiful color. (yes, I know it sort of steals the thunder of Dan Margulius' chapter but man, that one photo that the color blind student corrected looked great! Even Dan Margulius admitted in the chapter that his own work had been outdone by the person he'd taught the method to.)

The way I understand it, if you learn to use the eyedropper tool in Photoshop, and learn how the colors translate into percentages of CMYK, and how to use the CMYK color curves to help you, then you really can't go too wrong. Regardless of what color you see on your screen (and so in that sense, I say to Calibration, "fuggedabout it").

My own forays into 4 color printing have been limited. So I've done the best I could, talked to the printer about my concerns, made adjustments based on printer's response, and then let the printer do his job.

I really will buy Gary's book Looking Good in Color some day. I look forward to learning what he has to say about the topic. I need to buy it.

I do wonder if Photoshop 5 and PhotoPaint 8 produce the same quality of CMYK TIFF. I ask that because when I bought the CorelDraw WOW book, the production notes at the back of the book said that they made EPS files from Corel Draw and imported the EPSs into Photoshop5.

They said "it may be possible to use PhotoPaint 8 the same way that we used Photoshop 5 but being Photoshop users, we stuck with what we knew"

They (the people who produced the Corel Draw WOW book) also said that:

"until version 8, the quality of Corel DRAW's TIFFs didn't come close to what they could get by rasterizing in Photopaint 5, largely because the antialiasing in Corel DRAW produced rough edges or light 'halos' between colors"

I guess that would then be evidence of Xara's suitablity to produce CMYK TIFFs for printing, since Xara is awesome when it comes to anti-aliasing.

So there you have it, Tad. My two cents.

I really look forward to seeing what others add about this topic.

Athena
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[This message was edited by T. Athena Hatton on August 08, 2000 at 09:29 AM.

[This message was edited by T. Athena Hatton on August 08, 2000 at 09:40 AM.]

Hi Athena,

Glad to hear there are other Margulis fans out there...I've signed up to hear him speak at Seybold San Francisco later this month..Since he has quite an acid tongue in print, will be interesting to hear him in person...As the moderator on his own forum said : "don't poke at Dan with a stick, he's a mean enough bastard as it is"...(wonder if the censor will get that one??)

I mentioned Klaus' calibration page:

http://pixpush.com/calibrate/

to Margulis, and he said he "found it somewhat useful"...from him that is a major compliment....Everyone should check out Klaus' page...it works...Regards,,,Tad

Fun to hear about Margulis the Color Guru liking my calibration page! Thanks for telling me! (But your heading was wrong: my Secret Art Page is something completely else from my Calibration Page.)

Klaus
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