One of the most important things when photographing and retouching, is preparing your work for printing and to have consistantcorrected colour throughout your photographs. Even if you decide to push your colours to the extreme for creative effect, starting off with a proper correction is very beneficial.
It is important to ensure that all your settings are in-sync with each other; from camera to monitor to photoshop to printer, to produce the same photograph (or exceptionally close to) throughout different mediums. If you are converting your files to different colour spaces through each pre-production process, the more you can potentially degrade the quality of your original image.
Continuing on from my first blog post about adjusting your camera settings for shooting RAW to give yourself a higher dynamic range, I will now go through my process of bringing photographs into Photoshop for post-production.
Firstly, I would recommend calibrating your computer monitor. Many computer’s are set to a default colour hue of blue/cyan, this is so that when they are on display at a store, they appear bright and crisp and look more appealing to the consumer.
This is not useful for consistant colour correction. You need to be able to distinguish the black and white points of your monitor. You do not want to have deep shadows or blown out highlights or an over saturated color hue.
There are various products on the market that will easily calibrate your monitor for you. I would not recommend trying to judge it by eye. I use a Spyder 3 Elite, it’s brilliant and quick and I always receive consistant results every time.
Once your monitor has been calibrated, then you can begin setting up Photoshop for post-production.
I work in Adobe RGB (1998) - This will be consistant with my camera, as previously I said that I shoot with the Adobe RGB color profile.
You will need a RAW conversion software, Adobe Camera Raw is a great program to start with - otherwise Lightroom is what I use.
I convert my RAW photographs to Adobe RGB - 16 BIT at 300 DPI and saved as a PSD (or you can use TIFF) file for working on.
Here is a screen shot from ACR once you have clicked to open and edit a RAW file:
This is in Lightroom when you go to Export your RAW files:
In Photoshop, my colour workflow settings are as follows:
To get to this go to Edit > Colour Settings.
My proof settings are as follows:
To get to this, go to View > Proof Set-up > Custom.
It would be a good idea to save these settings as your preferences.
I choose to work in RGB for the sole reason that it is a very common and standard colour profile with a broad color gamut. sRGB has a lower color gamut range and therefore will not yield the maximum numbers of colours for print.
CMYK does come into play in terms of printing for magazine publication, as generally this is the most common profile used.
This is why it is set to U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 which is the standard for offset printing. This will be beneficial if you are requested to convert your colour profile to CMYK and then you won’t have highly noticeable colour shifts after doing so.
Once I have completed my retouching, I save a high resolution TIFF for printing.
I then covert the image to 8 BIT and the colour profile is kept at Adobe RGB (1998) with 300 DPI.
For viewing on the web, I save as a JPEG - 8 BIT - 72 DPI and converted to the colour profile sRGBIEC61966-2.1.
I use Convert to profile under the Edit tab. If you use the Assign profile it can make noticable colour shifts and should only be used if your original file does not have an embedded colour profile already.
That’s it! You are now ready to start achieving quality results from your photography!
Keep an eye out for my next post which will explain how to set-up your printer or lab for proofing your images based on your monitor calibration and how to get beautiful, near identical prints to what your photo would look like on your monitor originally.
