Printing photos, getting the colour back - can CM help?

[ggroess]

Are you printing these or having them printed? 
This kind of goes to the heart of a side discussion Mike and I are having about process controls and such.

Are the greens in question visable in RGB or are they LAB colors that might be out of Gamut? 
Again I'm curious

Greg

[derekfountain]

Are you printing these or having them printed? 
Are the greens in question visable in RGB or are they LAB colors that might be out of Gamut? 

I'm having them printed on a Frontier machine. They're not out of LAB gamut or anything like that. Interestingly, the "Gamut Warning" menu option is greyed out with this image and the Frontier profile selected for soft proofing. I never noticed that. But the greens do show up as out of gamut if I switch to Working CMYK. Quite what that tells me I'm not sure...  ???

[-default]

Working CMYK is not relevant to your situation.  The Gamut warning feature is only available for certain profiles, and is not particularly reliable in any case.

Although I remain somewhat skeptical of soft proofing, my actual experience with them is limited, and I'm very interested in whatever you come up with in this round of experiments.

[ggroess]

Have there been any greens that you "printed" that did look right? 

Zog has done some work with monitors and the ability to "see" colors. 
One of the weak points so far has been how the LCD handles greens.

He came up with a program to test your response to a full range of hues where you started the program and pressed the space bar when you saw a hue change.  The results were kind of mixed but it pointed out that the greens were very hard to separate on the screen.  It was a very interesting experiment.  I found it very discomforting that the greens were so hard to distinguish visually. 

Each hue was 10 away from the others, in the brightest greens I could not on screen distinguish a range of 40 overall compared to 20 in the red and 20 in the blues. 

The reasons for my line of question are obvious..if the monitor cannot show you the greens you would not even know that they are wacked...and soft proofing would be problematic at best.  If not totally inaccurate based on the severity of the loss in other colors.

http://www.curvemeister.com/forum/index.php?topic=1826.0

I think these might be related....

Greg

[-default]

Hmmm - you may have hit on something, Greg.  I have both a CRT and LCD on my system, and I may try comparing the two to see if the greens are easier to see.

[derekfountain]

Have there been any greens that you "printed" that did look right? 

Yes, absolutely. All the photos I had printed look fine, including nearly all the green bits. There were 2 photos in the set that had large areas of grass in them, and it's that grass that looks wrong. The trees in those photos look OK, and I can see that what I did was tweak the images so the trees, which are quite focal to the images, look good, while ignoring the grass. That left the grass over blown, but it doesn't tend to notice on screen. It's there, and when I'm looking at it it's clearly wrong, but for some reason my eye seems to miss it when looking at the image as whole. On the print the same colour in the same image grabs the eye and looks really garish. It's probably psychological or something. I deliberately chose a set of images with some strong colours, and none of the others look strange - just this green grass.

To be honest, I think the lesson I've learnt is that images viewed on screen are somehow more forgiving than the same images viewed in print. On these prints I can see much more clearly where I've gone wrong with the colours, where I've not sharpened enough, where my framing doesn't look right, etc. I don't think limitations of screen or soft proofing are relevant to what I'm seeing.

[-default]

Grass, and other foliage, should be closer to yellow than green to look right.

At this moment, thanks to an email from Greg, I'm re-reading chapter 11 of the latest Professional Photoshop.  In it, Dan deals with the issue of the eye accommodating itself to highlights on the display, and how this affects our perception of the same image in print.  There is also another effect, in which the reflection, or lack thereof, of the paper, causes colors that appear bright on screen to turn grayish on the print.