Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
What I want to show you is how to color manage, how to use printer profiles, how to do soft proofing, to take your prints, the inkjet prints that we'll be making today, to take them to the next level. I showed in the previous class all kinds of steps, some basic steps for how to process your photo in Photoshop and Lightroom, how to use good field techniques, but today, this class right now is just meat and potato. It's like nitty-gritty. It's stuff that's boring but incredibly important. So I'm gonna try and be as jazz-handy as possible to flash it up a little bit, but the truth is, it's kinda technical, and it's kinda boring, but it's what sets great printers, people, apart from the mediocre printers, okay? So everything I'm gonna show you today is important. I want you to ask questions. I want you to be involved with the class. Some of the things that you may ask are, "What about this printer specifically?" Or, "What about that printer specifically?" I'm probably not gonna know those...
types of answers, but in general, generally, I can give you a direction to go. Now, we're gonna be talking about paper profiles. Where do you find these profiles and how do you get 'em? And I can't answer for all of them, but I can give you the general way to find it. So let me talk about the plan for this class. Let's go to the presentation here, and I'll show you what we'll go through in this hour and a half. We're gonna talk about why color management. Why is color management important? And then we're gonna talk about color spaces and profiles. What's sRGB, what's Adobe RGB, what's ProPhoto RBG? What's all these other RGBs and what's CIEIE 619.66 dash 219I? I memorize this stuff, I don't know why. Because I've been looking at it for so many years. And then we're gonna talk about calibration and monitors. We're actually gonna do a monitor calibration. I'm gonna show you what that looks like. That process takes about two minutes, but man, that two minutes is time well spent, because that's what helps you see something on your computer monitor and have confidence that's what you're gonna produce in the final print. And then, the last part is I'm gonna spend a good amount of time showing you how to soft proof and showing you why soft proofing is so important. In fact, I'm gonna give you a preview right now of what soft proofing can do for you. I sound like a salesman. Here's what soft proofing can do for you! This print here, gorgeous, fantastic, beautiful print. I took the photo about two weeks ago, maybe ten days ago, in the Galapagos islands. Great print, huh? This photo, same photo, different paper. Hmm, there's some issues with it. A, I got some ink smudge on the top. That was just a physical handling error. That was my fault. But the color, not the color but the dynamic range, the depth, the blacks, they're just not there. Why? It's just different paper, what happened? Well, soft proofing would have alerted me to that problem. And then, during my editing after soft proofing, I could have fixed it so it looks maybe a little bit more like that, or until it looks the way I wanted it to look on this fine art paper. So that's where we're headed today, to basically go from this to that. As we go through this class, I just want you all to know I'm actually printing in real time as this class is going on. I have a print coming out right now. This print is from Scott Robert Lim. He was one of the CreativeLive instructors this week, and this is one of his red dress photographs. It is gorgeous. I'm looking at it going, oh my gosh, I cannot wait to show you all this beautiful print. But through the class I'll be printing in real time so you guys can see the results of our hard work.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Jenni Tanner
Mike is a great presenter and easy to understand. The content was good but I agree with others that it needed to spend more time on certain aspects. I felt like the videos ended abruptly, they often felt like they were cut off before Mike had finished what he was saying - poor editing CL :(
Cheryl Tarr
I enjoyed watching this. Mike is an engaging instructor. Very clear and easy to follow. I was somewhat familiar with the various color spaces but this solidified my understanding. I now have some 'next steps' to improve my printing, thank you!