Color management profiles

[61windsor]

I just posted this in the Olympus camera forum. I was so excited to find this site that I stopped scrolling when I found an Olympus forum....

"I am new to this forum and new to digital photography. Although, I have been around digital prepress (scans and image editing) for some time.

I just acquired a E500 and I want to put my iMAC to work. Does the E500 attach a color profile to each image or, if not, where can I find the proper profile? I have done some searching but no luck so far. "Olympus Help" has not been a help so far....

Any help with getting the most predictable color out of my system would be most appreciated."

Thanks,
Ray

[Medley]

Hello Ray, and welcome to the forums!

Your camera will likely have two different shooting modes: Adobe RGB and some version of sRGB. sRGB has fewer colors, but is the color space used by the web, so if your images are destined ONLY for the web, sRGB mode will give you a bit truer color there.

Adobe RGB has many more colors, and is used for images drstined for print.

Olympus may also have a proprietary color space that it uses for it's RAW image processor. You might seek more information in the Olympus forum. Basically though, if you use the Olympus raw converter, and it's proprietary color space, you may get a bit better color.

All of that won't help much for getting predictable color from your prints, but it's as much as the camera itself has to do with it.

Predictable color in prints requires two things: a profiled monitor, and an accurate printer profile.

Printers use a color profile all their own: CMYK. CMYK represents the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks used by a printer. Your editing software probably has a way to convert your images from whatever color space they were taken in to CMYK, and that's a step in the right direction. But they CMYK profile(s) used by your software are generic profiles, designed for use with most any computer. A printer profile is a very specific CMYK profile that dictates how a specific printer, using a specific ink and a specific kind of paper will produce color.

Here's an important comcept Ray- The printer is the constant in the equation. Unless you change ink or paper, the printer will print colors the same exact way time after time after time. It's not about getting the printer to print what the computer sees, it's about getting the computer to see what the printer prints. Understand that, and you're ahead of the game.

So a printer profile ( often referred to as an icc profile- icc is the file exrtension) sets the definition of colors for your computer, according to the performance of your printer. So now you have the computer and printer speaking the same language, color wise.

But, is your monitor displaying those colors correctly. Believe it or not, most don't. Have you ever been in a big department store, and looked down the TV aisle? Individually, the color of each set looks fine. But looking at them as a whole, there are vast differences in color tone and brightness. Computer monitors are like that too. You're going to be adjusting the color of your images according to what the monitor shows you, so you need a way of making sure the monitor is displaying those colors correctly.

That's where a monitor profiling system comes in. This is the single best thing you can do to improve your color. A profiling system is a combination of software and hardware. The software displays colors of a known value on your display, and the hardware (which plugs into one of your USB ports) reads the value of the color actually being emitted from you monitor. After dozens of such comparisons, the software creates a color profile for your monitor that allows it to display the colors accurately. So now you have the computer using the printer's color definitions, and the monitor displaying those colors correctly. You're on your way to spot-on color management.

By the way, the same hardware device that you used to read the colors being emitted by the monitor can often (depending on the sophistication of the profiling system) be used to read the colors from a test image printed by the printer. This is the easiest method of creating an icc profile. If you use a printing service, they will often have downloadable icc profiles for the printers they use.

I've thrown a lot of information at you as concisely as I could. Hopefully, it's helped you understand a few things. If you have questions, just ask.

Again, welcome to the forums!

- Joe U.

[Frog]

Welcome to the forums, Ray, and thanks for asking the question as now I've learned something from Medley.
We're all friendly between brands and don't care much what camera you shot with but are always interested in the results and helping each other do better.

[61windsor]

Thanks for the clear, detailed information. I actually do understand it.

Any suggestions for an economy priced monitor calibration package? It appears from my research that my G4 iMac monitor has limits in this area.

Thanks again,

Ray