Re: Question: Colour workflow, printing profiles versus Photoshop Curves Only

Hey Mark,

Others will chime-in here but here's my take.

A printer profile (as you certainly know) bends the image tones so that
the printer cranks out an image that looks just like the screen image.
When we use a curve in Photoshop to prepare our image for digital
negative output, we're doing the same thing.

Because so few students have reflection densitometers, I don't push
methods that get that require such hardware. And because the building of
printer profiles also gets into the "extra hardware" and "extra
nerdiness" areas, it seems best to avoid those avenues for most people
who want to make digital negs.

This isn't to say that good technicians can't exploit printer profiles
or Excel spreadsheets in efficient and time-saving ways. I just don't
find them to be a broad audience, friendly way to to the job.

The big advantage of printer profiles for color work is that they take
into consideration so many factors, whereas curves are rather limited.
But when densities (and not color) are our main concern, it seems curves
can work just fine.

Just my $0.02.

Dan

Mark MacKenzie wrote on 12/13/05, 4:04 PM:

>
> Has anyone attempted to develop profiles for use with their printers
based on a particular workflow?is I mean have they attempted to develop
a printer profile that at
the very least gets them back to a "ground zero" so that what is done in
Photoshop or some other image manipulation program is just that
> creative/expressionistic manipulation?
>

-- 
www.DanBurkholder.com
www.TinyTutorials.com