Soft Proofing for Color Confidence
Lesson 6 from: Controlling Your ColorJared Platt
Soft Proofing for Color Confidence
Lesson 6 from: Controlling Your ColorJared Platt
Lesson Info
6. Soft Proofing for Color Confidence
Lessons
Lesson Info
Soft Proofing for Color Confidence
So now we want to talk about, so we got past our monitor, now we have another problem; we're outputting it. And when we're output it we're outputting it to a piece of paper, or to a tablet, or to the web. So we need it to look correct on the way out and we need to know what it's going to look like. I need to know what it's going to look like, for instance, if I...hold on, let's see. There we go. Okay so, one of my favorite images that I shot last summer. So I love the graphic-ness, I love the colors of it, I love everything about the image. But if I'm in the develop module how do I know what that's going to print like if I send it away to be printed by my print-house; Which is Whitehouse Custom Color and I want to print it on metal? What's it going to look like? I don't know. Do I have to actually go spend 20, $ to print this thing to see what it's going to look like? The answer is no because, fortunately, for me my Print House knows how important color is. And so they have a series of...
"definitions" profiles sitting up on their website. I download those and I can install those into Lightroom. Now, let me show you where this gets installed before we go into the discussion. So I click on my hard drive. And I have to go up to the, so if I go to the "Go" folder, and I hold down the option key. I'm speaking Mac right now. I don't know how to get here on a PC but you'll find it. You have to go to the library. And in the library you have to go application, support. And then inside of application, support, you go to Adobe, and then inside of Adobe you can find your color profiles. And so if you go to Camera Raw; see, here's your camera profiles right there. And then if you want to find the color profiles for your printer; by the way, if you buy a printer and install the driver it will install the profiles for all their paper to be begin with. So it's only when you're using papers that aren't specific to a printer that's connected to your computer that you need to install separate profiles. But you can see my profiles right down here. See that? I can download these profiles from Whitehouse and then I just need to install them into my application here. And it is in, if you go to library and you go to color. There, color sync profiles. You see that? So this one is not even in the Lightroom area. It's in library, color sync, profiles, and then there they are. And all I have to do is just drag those in to that folder. And now I have all of those profiles ready for me to view. So let me show you what that looks like. So now if I go into the develop module and I'm working on this photo. And remember I can first, camera profile first. I go into my camera. And there's the appropriate, look how much it changes. See how much the color changes? So this is what Adobe thinks that my camera is seeing and this is what my camera is actually seeing. It's a little warmer. So I can click on that. Now I have dead on accurate color for that. Close the profile browser. And now if I wanna see what it's gonna look like on any given paper, I simply down to the, in the Dell module, in the toolbar; which you hit the "T" key to open up the toolbar right down here at the bottom. And I hit soft proofing. When I click on that, it is now showing me, and sometimes if you have it set up so that it's like paper white it'll show up like that. But then I always find the white distracts me from what the image looks like. So you can right-click the background and just say keep it black so that I doesn't distract me. But if you want to see what it's going to look like on the paper you can simulate that paper. So I go up to, soon as I click on Soft Proofing, right below the histogram you'll see that it says Sprofile, SRGB. But also I have all these other profiles and here is a metallic print if I click on that, that's what it looks like. Did you see the difference? So watch, I'm going to change the profile. Ready? Here's Soft Proofing. That's with metallic. That's without. Do you see what's happening to the white? The white is becoming silver. Because why? Because the white is nothing and the silver is going to show through of the metallic paper. So I know exactly what this will look like if I print it on silver. Not going to look good. I'm not interested. So I've just saved myself 30 bucks. And so instead of printing it on metallic papter, I could choose something else. What would it look like if I chose a deep matte paper? Okay, so now it's white but look at the blacks, the blacks are actually getting kind of mucky. Because it's not a glossy paper. So maybe this either needs to be printed on a more contrasting paper or it needs to be worked on. So now that I'm in Soft Proofing I can then work on the actual underlying image by simply going in and saying, "okay, I need to take the black down, bring the black back." Right? So, I'm going to zoom in. See? We can see that that black is a little too flat. So now I can just take the black area and bring it down. See? I'm intensifying the black. And soon as I slide something it says, "hey, you're changing this while you're Soft Proofing it. Do you want to make a secondary copy? So you're not adjusting the original one that's great for your screen." And I'm going to say, "yeah, create a proof copy." So now I'm working on the proof copy and now I'm going to actually add some extra clarity, a little extra texture; which by the way is brand new inside of Lightroom. Play with that, you'll love it. And I'm going to do a little dehaze. And all of that is helping those blacks to look better. So now when I zoom out I like the way it looks a little bit better. I can print it on matte and just know that it's going to be a softer looking image. Or I could say, "eh, I'm going to abandon that. I'm going to go back to my original and print it on a luster." Boom! Perfect. That's what I want. Okay, so you can see what it's going to look like before you print it and adjust it based on the print you're going to get.
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Ratings and Reviews
Bobby McKinney
Excellent class, good job on behalf of Jared Platt
Lauren
My favorite printing class and I've taken quite a few. A lot of very helpful information in a short amount of time. I already owned a Colorchecker passport, so now I know how to make the most of it.
Lydia Hall
Great class on how to achieve color accuracy.