Color Management

__This is for advanced or professional photographers that understand icc profile applications. It is by no means necessary for the average photographer.__
If you are professional photographers looking to have complete control of your image outputs you can work with our printing profiles.

We work in SRGB color space and you can download our ICC profile here. See Softproofing instructions below.

Accurate color management requires that you address the three devices in your digital imaging workflow equally: your camera (input device) and your monitor and printer (output devices). Since color management requires that you have: (a) an ICC profile that describes the color response of your camera, (b) an ICC profile that describes the color response of your monitor, and (c) an ICC profile that describes the color response of your printer, it can be argued that there is no need to attempt color management or to work with ICC profiles unless you have data (profiles) for all three variables: camera, printer, and monitor.

__What are ICC Profiles? __
An ICC (International Color Consortium) profile is like an evaluation report of a device's capabilities and limits in color and tone. Profiles are actually small files ranging from 50kb to 1000kb in size. Digital cameras, scanners, monitors and printers can be characterized for profiling.

Most device profiles are readily available with software from the Internet. These profiles are however mostly generic and may not take into consideration specific variance characteristics. A printing device's ICC profile will consider the properties of ink, ribbon or toner as well as the type of paper it's printing on. A monitors ICC profile will describe the color gamut of the display. Creating accurate output profiles require the use of software such as Kodak's ColorFlow, Praxisoft Compass Profile, WiziWYG, Pictographics' ColorSynergy, Color-Vision's Dr. Pro and others. Color management tools include hardware such as a colorimeter, spectrophotometer or even a scanner. You can purchase software and equipment and create your own profiles (ranging from $100 to $5,000) or hire a professional profiling service. Also, when you load printer drivers such as for the Epson printers, it automatically loads ICC profiles into your system for use.

And there are ICC profiles ready to be downloaded from many vendor web sites.

__Soft Proofing using our icc profile __
Some colors on the edge of the gamut are not reproducible by the printers. As a photographer you can check for and correct the "out of gamut" conditions by soft proofing the image with the provided icc profile. Here is how:

Download our icc profile [http://dev.photostockplus.com/upload/photostock.icc|here] and save it to proper location:

  • Win98, Win98SE, WinMe - C:\Windows\System\Color
  • Win XP - C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Drivers\Color
  • Windows NT, Win 2000 - C:\WinNT\System32\Spool\Drivers\Color
  • Mac OS 9.x - System Folder>ColorSync Profiles
  • Mac OS X - Library>ColorSync>ColorSync Profiles

(If the ICC files are not in any of these folders on your computer you can find the correct folder by searching your computer for *.icc.)

When in Adobe PhotoShop do the following:

  1. Go to View>ProofSetup>Custom...
  2. Profile: Club_Frontier1_06-01-05.icc
  3. Do not select Preserve Color Numbers (leave the box unchecked)
  4. Intent: "Perceptual"
  5. Select Use Black Point Compensation

At this point you can name and Save this proof setup for future use.

You can view and edit the image while in the "proof" mode and see immediately how your corrections will be reflected in the final print.