On Jul 24, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Armand Rosenberg wrote:
Not a novice but no expert either... I am using LR4's Book module (OS X 10.6.8) and would like to ensure "accurate" color before I hit that "send to Blurb" button (since it's linked to my credit card). LR4 converts images to sRGB before sending them to Blurb. I am previewing my photos on an NEC PA271W monitor. Does it matter what setting I choose in MultiProfiler, such as sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.?? I don't understand what effect (if any) these monitor settings would have in this case. I am used to profiling the more conventional monitors, but I don't recall such choices.
Unfortunately you can’t get “accurate color” out of LR to Blurb because, as you point out, sRGB is sent to them and naturally sRGB isn’t the output color space. In LR, you should be fine viewing the images in MelissaRGB. You could soft proof to sRGB but that isn’t going to buy you anything useful. As for the CMYK profile they provided, you can’t use it in LR as it only supports RGB output profiles. But since Blurb provides a single CMYK profile and expect it to define all the possible papers they provide, plus you have no idea what rendering intent would be used (with or without Black Point Compensation), soft proofing in Photoshop seems pretty silly to me. It is highly questionable if this CMYK profile reflects the actual print conditions. My experience with Blub out of LR is you have to send off your images and hope for the best. That said, I wasn’t at all happy with the quality of the book I got back. I used some pretty tough reference images (Roman 16’s, synthetic test images etc). One image was placed on the book cover and in the inside and the two didn’t print anything alike which is a bad sign. Several pages had what looked like black spots (dirty toner?). Andrew Rodney http://www.digitaldog.net/