The initial directory was empty I think, but I found usr\share\color\icc\colord had profiles, so selected this.
colord has these items -
I can see the soft-proofing happening by clicking the icon under the image preview, and can use the adjacent icon to see the grey areas. I thought the print profile was selected in the colour tool as the Output Profile, but it seems to be the setting in Preferences which is driving things. The Output Profile doesn’t show all the profiles, in particular not the ones beginning FOGR which I’m guessing are proper print profiles. Differing choices for Output Profile change the histogram but not the preview, even though soft-proofing is enabled. So I’m getting confused!
So I then think the print profiles need to be in
usr\share\rawtherapee\iccprofiles\output
but when I try to copy some into here, and right click in the file manager, the paste option is greyed out. So guessing this folder is protected?
(I’ve got a wide gamut monitor hence using the “medium” monitor profile incidentally)
Using RT version: 5.0-r1-gtk3.
Thanks for reading.
I am not a color management expert by any means. But your selection, as default monitor profile, of RT_Medium_gsRGB is not appropriate. That color space is intended for output (to the monitor/printer) not as a monitor profile.
hi @mikesan. I don’t understand your comment. Talking about the Preferences, RawPedia says “You should also define the ICC profile of your monitor when you’ve done a calibration.” And this item - Monitor default colour profile - seems to work fine. It sets the profile shown under the preview window when you launch RT, and changing the latter affects what you see as I’d expect, i.e. changing from “medium” to RT_sRGB makes it more saturated (with no OSD changes to the actual screen).
But I’m still unclear about soft-proofing and I see you started a separate thread, more to-the-point than my ramblings!, so that’s good.
Thanks, I got the files copied. (Found about 4 ways to do it, one with severe health warning, realised names are case-sensitive, OMG what a learning curve Linux is…!)
The output profile selector is set to only allow you to choose display type profiles using the RGB colorspace. I don’t know the reason for this restriction, @Hombre do you know?
Generally all places outside of your “home” in Linux require elevated privileges.
Your monitor color profile is incorrectly set, as @mikesan pointed out. Profile your screen (using DisplayCAL or whatever) and set the resulting ICC as your monitor color profile.
Because RT generates RGB files. Before setting this filter, I’ve used a CMYK color profile and RT crashed. Now I’m not the best person to speak on this subject, but for sure RT only allow RGB outputs.
I appreciate I ought to profile it, and probably will*, but in the meantime, I’ve set the screen to AdobeRGB (it also does REC709, DCI-P3 and of course sRGB), and so I thought RT_Medium_gsRGB was correct for the time being. Isn’t this an equivalent to AdobeRGB?
'* for anyone interested, the screen is a Dell UP2516D with 2560x1440 pixels, and comes with profiling software, but you need an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and Windows, and the X-Rite is about uk£200. So maybe I’ll go a different route like e.g. DisplayCAL…
@Hombre I may be wrong as I haven’t created printer profiles yet, but I thought it’s possible and valid to apply a printer profile to an RGB image. If that’s correct, then RT should allow showing printer profiles in the output profile selector. @Elle could you clarify the situation? And do printer profiles come in RGB and CMYK varieties?
@Morgan_Hardwood Yes, it’s perfectly fine and valid to convert an image from an RGB working space to a printer profile. And yes, printer profiles come in both RGB and CMYK varieties. If you are interested in making a printer profile, the ArgyllCMS mailing list archives (argyllcms Mailing List Archive) are a treasure trove of information.
From what I can tell from photographic printer profiles available on the web, it seems just about everyone who makes a profile for photographic printing does make RGB profiles. Though of course the printer must have some sort of internal way of converting from RGB to whatever number of inks the printer comes with (photographic printers use way more than just 4 inks these days).
I don’t own a printer, so I don’t have any practical experience profiling a printer or making my own prints. But I’ve done a fair amount of experimenting with printer profiles while testing soft proofing. And these experiments of course involve converting from an RGB working space to a printer profile.
The above statement is a disclaimer so there’s no question in anyone’s mind - I am not an expert on printing. I’ve subscribed to the ArgyllCMS mailing list for maybe ten years now, so I end up reading a lot of posts about printer profiles, but that doesn’t make me an expert! There is a great big huge gap between reading and doing!
One question I have, and maybe someone who really is an expert (translate: has actual experience profiling a printer and using the profile) can answer:
When you make a printer profile, is the printer profile used only for soft proofing? Or do you also convert the image from its RGB working space to the printer profile before feeding the image to the printer? Or does this vary depending on the printer? Various commercial printing places do supply soft proofing profiles, but they don’t usually want the image actually converted to the soft proofing profile when you send them a digital file.
hi Elle, I’ve used printer profiles. I had use of an Epson R2400 for a while. I sent off the colour charts, got back the profile, and used this with P’shop CS3 to print. P’shop had a panel in the print process where you specified the profile, plus rel.col or perceptual etc., and then on hitting OK, the printer did its job. It was essential to use the profile. And you could also soft-profile as part of preparing the image for printing.
I’m interested in this because I’ve got loads of photos I’d like to get printed. I have used UK outfit DS Colour Labs previously, they do standard prints at what seems like a good price and quality to me (as well as dearer art paper ones). (I don’t stand to benefit saying this…) For their “standard” / budget prints, they DO want the image converted, whereas they say not for the art paper ones. I just downloaded their glossy profile and it seems to work for soft-proofing. But given what’s been said above, I was not surprised to find I couldn’t select it as the Output Profile. So folks, my vote (if I have one) goes for implementing this! (I haven’t looked at Gimp for printing). Here’s what DSCL say about preparing the files via P’shop - Once you have your profiles installed within Photoshop you can navigate to Edit > Convert to Profile. A window will pop up which contains a dropdown menu titled ‘Destination Space’. Click on the dropdown menu and find the desired profile from the list.
…from http://dscolourlabs.co.uk/about/NEWNEW_Technical_Support
I wonder why they ask customers to do this? Surely they could apply the profile? It must put people off.
Cheers.
@Morgan_Hardwood [quote=“Morgan_Hardwood, post:9, topic:3392”]
I may be wrong as I haven’t created printer profiles yet, but I thought it’s possible and valid to apply a printer profile to an RGB image. If that’s correct, then RT should allow showing printer profiles in the output profile selector.
[/quote]
It is curious that RT restricts the choice of output profiles offered in the drop-down list. I have an .icc printer profile provided by the commercial printer specifically for soft-proofing. I have copied this file to the RT folder under iccprofiles\output, expecting it to appear in the output profile drop-down list; but it does not appear, thus making it impossible for me to use the printer profile for soft-proofing.
Hombre explains this:
However the use of an .icc profile for output should not change the file type, it just converts the color space. I do this all the time in PS to soft proof with a printer profile. The resulting output is still an RGB file.
The reason is simple. As long as the file to be converter is in your software, it knows the source color space from which to convert. In many cases if you just send them your file that information may be missing.
Such commercial printers are wrong to do so. Andrew Rodney (otherwise known as Digital Dog) has written an interesting response to this question on the p.net forum. Sorry I cannot find the link at this moment.
@RawConvert Thanks! for sharing your experiences with commercial printers. Mine have been a bit different. Of the four or five commercial printing places I’ve looked at, two supplied soft proofing profiles but requested that the image file not be converted to the printer profile, and stated that they only use perceptual intent to make the conversion for printing. The other places were local printers who clearly don’t have much of a clue (well, one didn’t know what AdobeRGB was, so that was the end of that conversation, and the other turned my sample black and white image into shades of purple and white and then said that was “normal” . . . ).
Being able (or rather required) to make the conversion yourself for standard prints that’s nice! it means you can choose the conversion intent, plus of course make whatever corrections you want to make.
I do soft proof most of the images I process to a couple of different printer profiles, just as a check to make sure I’m producing printable colors, and almost always I use relative colorimetric intent. Some day I hope to actually start making prints.
As far as the art papers go, these papers often have a very limited dynamic range with a fairly light black point. I can see why a printing establishment would prefer to make these conversions themselves, just to keep the customer from going nuts dealing with the mismatched black points.
GIMP 2.9 has a very nice framework for soft proofing. Unfortunately there are problems with LCMS soft proofing that might, or might not, affect results depending on the image precision and the TRC of the source color space (and especially if you are using my patched version of GIMP to edit floating point linear gamma images). These LCMS limitations affect all software that uses LCMS for soft proofing, more or less depending on the allowed workflows and whatever compensating workarounds the image editor/raw processor might provide.
From what I can tell through testing, PhotoFlow (the linear gamma branch, I’m not sure about stable) has pretty good workarounds for most of the LCMS limitations. I’m not sure what the RawTherapee processing pipeline really is, so I’m not sure whether RT even allows to replicate the problematic situations that affect some (but not all) workflows using GIMP (the same issues also affect Krita).
As I understand it (prior to RT-5) the first step in soft-proofing was to select the printer profile under “Color Management>output profile.” If the profile does not appear in the drop-down list options, how does one select it?
With RT-5 it may be different. See my post here: here
Still awaiting an answer. Today’s revisions to RawPedia do not supply the answer.
Surely it’s now clear! - soft-proofing is done using Preferences | Colour Management. But you have to ensure the profile is in the appropriate folder.
But you can’t go to the next stage and burn the profile into an output file.
