Out of Gamut: Cruel Jokes, or Things That Look Like They’d Work, But Don’t
Color management is hard enough to figure out even when things work as advertised. None of us needs the help of features that come with undocumented limitations, that perform incorrectly, or that simply fail to work. Alas, plenty such pitfalls await. Here are a few of the blind alleys, dead ends, and patches of quicksand that are better left untraveled.
Monitor Profiles
Whether you use a Macintosh or a PC, chances are your operating system loaded a whole raft of monitor profiles on your hard disk. The best-case scenario is that these profiles were created from the vendors’ “ideal” specifications for each monitor. But monitors vary a lot: Even within a single manufacturing batch, it’s quite common to find significant variations from one to another. When you factor in your preferred settings for the brightness and contrast controls, it’s a pretty safe bet that your display will bear no great resemblance to the ideal state described by the profile.
That’s the best case. In the worst case, by poking around in the innards of a few provided profiles, you may well find that a significant number are identical save for their names. Regardless, best case or worse, the profiles are highly unlikely to define just the right colors for your monitor. You’re much better off building a custom profile using one of the free visual tools such as Adobe Gamma or Apple’s Default Calibrator.
Photoshop, Photo CD, and Missing-Profile Messages
All versions of Photoshop since 5.0 warn you when you open a file that doesn’t have an embedded profile. You then have the opportunity to associate a profile with it and to convert the file into your chosen working color space. This is basically, as Martha Stewart might say, a Good Thing.
However, when you open a Photo CD image in Photoshop, you get dumped into a dialog box (see Figure 1) created by Kodak, and this dialog box makes you choose a source and destination profile for the Photo CD image (you can’t open it without choosing profiles because Photoshop needs to convert the image from Kodak’s Photo YCC format to one that Photoshop can understand – RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, or Lab).
Figure 1
When you choose the appropriate profiles, the image gets converted correctly into the Photoshop working space of your choice. But before the image opens, you get Photoshop’s Missing Profile dialog (see Figure 2). This is a bug, plain and simple, and it’s been there more than two years. Just click Don’t Convert to dismiss the dialog box. Any other course of action will throw off the color.
Figure 2
ColorSync Color Matching, Not
In the Color Matching panel of the various versions of the Mac LaserWriter PostScript printer driver, you’ll find a menu item labeled ColorSync Color Matching (see Figure 3), which lets you specify a target profile and rendering intent. Nowhere is it written that this feature doesn’t work with the vast majority of applications people actually use to work with color.
Figure 3
ColorSync matching in the driver works if, and only if, the application from which you’re printing allows the driver to create the PostScript code. This rules out most professional graphics applications, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker and InDesign, Corel PAINT and DRAW, Macromedia FreeHand, and QuarkXPress, all of which use the driver simply to pass through to the printer PostScript code that the application generates. If you use ColorSync color matching with one of these applications, you won’t see any error messages or warnings, but you won’t get color matching, either.
Composite Printing in QuarkXPress 4.x
With version 4.0, QuarkXPress introduced a feature that allows you to make your composite printer simulate your final separations (see Figure 4). The idea is that you can use an inexpensive desktop printer as a proofer for your final press output. This would all be handy and exciting if the feature worked. Sadly, it doesn’t, and it hasn’t in any version of QuarkXpress since the feature was introduced.
Figure 4
To put the feature to the test, you can print a composite print with your final separations set to a sheetfed press profile, then change the separations profile to one for newsprint and print the composite again. If the feature worked, you’d expect to see an obvious difference. But every time we’ve tried it, we’ve gotten two identical prints from the composite printer. Presumably the folks at Quark think that as long as the feature appears in a features list, it doesn’t matter whether or not it works, because when it doesn’t, users will just think they messed up because color management is just so darned complicated…
If you really need desktop proofing from QuarkXPress, your best bet is to buy Praxisoft’s CompassProXT. This XTension not only lets you use your composite printer properly as a proofer, but also extends QuarkXPress’s native color management features to cover EPS (vector and bitmap), JPEG, and even (if you’re crazy enough to try it and you’re on a Mac) PICT files. QuarkXPress’s native color management features cover only imported TIFFs and QuarkXPress-generated colors.
ColorSync 3 Control Panel Settings
Hardly a week goes by without my being asked how to set up the ColorSync control panel profile settings. The short answer (which you won’t find in any Apple documentation) is that, thus far at least, the only setting applications care about is the Display Profile (which before ColorSync 3 was known as the System Profile). The other profile settings are used exclusively by the AppleScripts that accompany ColorSync (look in Apple Extras>ColorSync Extras>AppleScript Files Folder). The scripts are actually quite useful and powerful, but if you don’t plan to use them, you can ignore the profile settings in the Control Panel. For the record, in ColorSync 3, you can’t actually set the Display Profile from the ColorSync control panel. Instead, go to the Monitors (formerly Monitors and Sound) control panel and click the Color tab, then set the profile there.
None of this is likely to make you feel warm and fuzzy about color management. Nevertheless, I hope it will save you some hair-tearing frustration.
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I’m always searching the web for colormanagement answers and as usual I come upon Bruce. Its a long curvyyyy road.
Sadly, this isn’t the only Quark feature that doesn’t work. Trapping is another. Sometimes it works, but in other situations it can go badly wrong. Essentially, it can’t properly process the trapping for an element that crosses several backgrounds. So you can end up with knockouts and overprints you don’t want. The bottom line is, you can’t rely on it, so it’s a waste of space.
I gave up on ColorSync when, having set everything up correctly including installing printer profiles, it decided that reversed white text needed to have about 20% cyan and 10% magenta added to it to make it “correct white”
I pretty well agree with everything you have pointed out here, although it is my experience that not many production people have the eye or skill to calibrate their monitors properly with the Adobe or Apple calibration utilities. In order to get more consistency across all of our equipment it is neccessary to use monitor calibration sensors and software and then have one EXPERT EYE tweak the proofers profiles to get the closest results to press proofs. They are never perfect, but they are close enough to satisfy our customers’ eyes. In Xpress you just turn off the color management and make sure you carefully scrutinize your color images and mixes in a more reliable environment (like Photoshop).
Thank you Bruce for once again providing information that the rest of us are unlikely to be able to get access to.
I can’t tell you how many hours and days I’ve spent trying to get colour management to work as advertised, and fighting by trial and error through inadequately documented or non-functioning parts of the process.
It’s a sad comment on the state of the technology and its interface that your report on what DOESN’T work, and isn’t worth the time to try is so helpful.
For the moment, I rely mainly on the same half-measures I’ve used for years — a good, properly calibrated monitor, trusting the colour on-screen in Photoshop, and largely ignoring everything else. Lower-cost pre-film proofs from an expert-operated Epson 9000 help too.
One of these days, it would be nice to be able to do it all on my own desktop, with reliable colour on screen and reasonably reliable output to my own lower-cost inkjet. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point all along?
Ben Wolfe
Green by Design