Re: Colormatch vs Adobe 98
Re: Colormatch vs Adobe 98
- Subject: Re: Colormatch vs Adobe 98
- From: Don Hutcheson <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 10:42:46 -0500
>
I'm a photographer, scanning my pictures which must be good enough
>
for use in magazines or books, and digital printing. In which color space
>
should I work? I've been using Colormatch for several years now, but some
>
people around me are saying that Adobe 98 is the new standard in the
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prepress industry. Thank you for your help.
>
Luc Delahaye
Luc,
Although they are well known and often recommended, neither ColorMatch nor
Adobe 98 can be considered 'good' RGB spaces as they both clip saturated
colors (especially reds, cyans and magentas) which could have been printed
on a good offset press. Adobe 98 improves greens but makes little
improvement in reds or blues and still clips saturated reds, magentas,
cyans, yellows and oranges very noticeably.
This clipping only shows up on extremely saturated images and less critical
users often don't notice it. But once a photographer sees the clipping on
their own work, they never want to risk it again.
For six years many big photographers, publishers, separators & agencies have
eliminated clipping with the 'DonRGB' color space, which you can download
free from www.hutchcolor.com/profiles.html.
DonRGB is a carefully-tuned, well-proven 'wide' gamut space that encompasses
not only the full SWOP space, but also virtually the whole Ektachrome gamut.
You can also download a sister space called 'BestRGB' which improves reds
and magentas even more to encompass the extended gamut of Fujichrome Velvia.
In practice either one is excellent.
The big advantage of DonRGB and BestRGB over ColorMatch and Adobe is that
your original images will lose no saturation due to CLIPPING when you
convert into Photoshop's 'Working RGB' space. This means you can output your
edited and archived RGB images onto a variety of devices or presses and
always get the best color each device can produce. There will still be some
GAMUT COMPRESSION when you go from Working RGB to a printer's CMYK, but this
will be handled smoothly by the printer's profile - at least if it is a good
profile. And you can preview the effects of that compression with the
Command-Y function while editing your RGB images.
The disadvantage of working in Adobe or ColorMatch is that your first
conversion from scanner or camera RGB into the working RGB space will CLIP
some colors brutally, as there is no smooth gamut compression when
converting to a Photoshop RGB space. This means that subtle differences
between two saturated reds, for example, will be lost forever.
A good analogy of CLIPPING and COMPRESSION is the difference between cutting
off your hand to shorten your reach, or simply bending your arm. The latter
hurts less and you still have the whole arm.
You can test the clipping of different RGB spaces by assigning them to my
'RGBXPLORER' image (www.hutchcolor.com/Images_and_targets.html) and
converting to any good CMYK profile. Adobe and ColorMatch usually fall well
short of 100% in saturated patches, most noticeably reds, because the RGB
space is smaller than the gamut of a good CMYK press. DonRGB and BestRGB
should convert to virtually 100% of C, M and Y in their respective patches,
depending on the CMYK profile.
The only real downside with a wide space like DonRGB or BestRGB is that you
have to be careful when sending them out into the world. Always make sure
the recipient knows what an ICC profile is and how to use it. If you assign
a wide-gamut profile to a normal RGB image it will look over-saturated. If
you assign a normal RGB profile to a wide-gamut image it will look
de-saturated.
Let me know if this helps.
Don
*************************************
Don Hutcheson
Hutcheson Consulting
(Color Management Solutions)
Phone: (908) 689 7403
Mobile: (908) 500 0341
email@hidden
*************************************