ParrotTalk

There are two places to control the color of an image once you send it to the printer- once in Photoshop’s Print dialog, and again in the printer driver.  Here’s a rundown on the process.

In most cases for color printing you want to allow Photoshop to color-manage the printer, and turn off all controls in the printer’s system drivers.  One of the few exceptions is when you want to use the Advance B/W driver features of the Epson printers…  in those cases you turn the color management over to Epson, and take it away from Photoshop.

Take a look at these videos- the first is showing how to print color, and the second is showing how to use the Advanced B/W driver.

I should note that the color printing process shown here works for many printers, not just Epson. The Photoshop dialog remains the same, in each driver there is some place- you may have to dig around- that you need to turn the driver controls off. It’s very common to see a “Color” tab in the driver, and a selection for “Application Color Management” and “Printer Color Management”. You need to select “Application..” if you see that- indicating the application (Photoshop in this case) will handle color.

Now for a look at Advanced B/W:

-Ted Dillard

Rendering Intents are, essentially, the logic used in remapping color into a smaller color space. The two basic rendering intents that we are dealing with are Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric.

Perceptual intent presumes that you want to keep the relationships between all the colors, that is, if you have colors that appear different, we want to keep that appearance when they are remapped. Converting colors with Perceptual Intent requires that we move all the colors in the space around a bit. I like to make an analogy to a sponge, or a balloon. Perceptual intent kind of squishes the sponge up, and the entire sponge changes shape a little.

Relative Colorimetric intent is more of a cookie-cutter effect. If colors are outside of the smaller space they are moved to the closest color inside the space. All the colors inside the space remain untouched. If, in the conversion, the colors being remapped lose their relationship to each other, that is, lose their “spacing”, well, so be it.

Here are some examples. I went back to our color burple, and made a couple of other colors… blue, burple and purple. Here they are, sitting well outside the Epson Premuim Luster color gamut (shown very lightly shaded).

The next illustration shows the three colors mapped into the gamut of Premium Luster using Perceptual Intent. You can see that the distances between the three are almost exactly the same, and they’ve been moved around a little. This is to maintain our perception of them, and their relationship to each other.

The final illustration shows the same colors mapped in using Relative Colorimetric Intent. As you can see, they are closer together, they are mapped directly into the gamut just to the nearest available color, with little concern for maintaining any relationship between them.

So when do you use which one? Keep in mind that with Perceptual Intent everything gets changed… Relative Colorimetric, only the colors that need to change get changed. There’s your answer.

You use Perceptual Intent when you need to make some big changes in your gamut, and the “look” of the colors is important. For example, if you have a full, rich blue and purple image and you are printing it to Premium Luster you may want to use Perceptual Intent so that the colors will print with the same differences and “spacing” you’re seeing in AdobeRGB, but get mapped into the colors that the printer can work with.

Relative Colorimetric Intent is really handy when, for the most part, all of your colors are inside the printer gamut, and only a few, like our burple, aren’t playing nice. We don’t need to push everything around just to get burple in there, we just need to push it in, and leave everything pretty much as it sits.

This is a great case of, if you know where your colors fall, and you know what your gamut is, you can make the best choice about how the system is going to convert the colors and keep as much of the image intact.

(Excerpt from Color Pipeline- courtesy of Ted Dillard -Lark Books)

Adobe has some great, and very detailed information on how to get the most out of your system by tuning your configuration and features settings to exactly what you need.  Not only that, if you’re building a system or reconfiguring your workstation with drives, RAM or graphics, there are some good ideas about what works best, where to put your money and what is the bare minimum.

Here are my favorite tips- the top ten of optimizing Photoshop, but do yourself a favor- have a cuppa and sit down and read the links at the bottom of the page.  Windows or Mac, it doesn’t matter, there’s a lot to learn, and some serious speed to be gained!

(Quotes are from the Adobe Tech site listed below.)

RAM and Processor Specs- “The performance of Adobe Photoshop CS4 is affected most by available random-access memory (RAM) and computer processor speed.”

File Size- “The maximum file size Photoshop CS4 supports is 300,000 x 300,000 pixels, except for PDF files, which are still constrained by a 30,000 x 30,000 pixel, and a 200 x 200 inch limitation.

File size capability for Photoshop CS4:
* PSD files: 2 GB
* TIFF files: 4 GB
Note: Most applications cannot work with TIFF files larger than 2 GB.
* PSB files: 4 Exabytes (4096 Petabytes, or 4 million Terabytes)
* PDF files: 10 GB (pages are limited to a maximum size of 200 inches).
Note: Large Document Format files (.PSB) cannot be read by Photoshop 7.0.x or earlier.”

Scratch Disks- “A scratch disk in Photoshop is similar to virtual memory in Mac OS. For the best performance, you should set the primary scratch disk to a defragmented hard drive that is not running the operating system and that has plenty of unused space and fast read/write speeds (rather than a network drive or removable media).”

Available HD Space- “Photoshop requires at least 2 GB of free hard-disk space, but more is recommended. The OS volume should contain at least 20 GB of free space to ensure that the virtual memory system has plenty of available hard disk space. If you have more than one hard drive, it is suggested that you specify additional scratch disks.”

Cache- “Setting the Image Cache higher than 4 improves the performance when working on larger images by redrawing them faster.

If you use files that have small pixel dimensions and many (50+) pixel layers, you’ll get the best performance if you set the cache to 1 or 2. If you use files that have large pixel dimensions, set the cache higher.”

Video Card- “For Photoshop to access the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), your display card must contain a GPU that supports OpenGL and has enough RAM to support Photoshop’s functions – at least 128 MB, and a display driver that supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0.”

Disable Export Clipboard- “The Export Clipboard setting allows Photoshop to export anything copied to the clipboard as a PICT file. Exporting is time consuming, however, and occurs whenever you quit Photoshop or go from Photoshop to another application. Deselecting this setting increases the performance of Photoshop.”

Purge- “Purge Undo, Clipboard, or Histories.  Undo, Clipboard, and Histories all hold image data. To release RAM, choose Edit > Purge to purge the Undo and Clipboard.”

History States- “In Photoshop CS4, each history state that includes an operation that affects the entire image (for example, when you apply Gaussian blur or unsharp mask to the entire image) creates a full copy of your image at its original size. … When you reduce the number of history states available, you potentially reduce the number of copies of your image using scratch space.”

Fonts- “Check your system for damaged fonts.  If there is a damaged font on your system and you have WYSIWYG font preview turned on, your computer can slow significantly. If you turn off font preview and your computer performance improves significantly, test for a damaged font.”

Take a wander over to the Adobe Tech site-
Mac site here.
Windows XP and Vista here.

-Ted Dillard

This is a nice, visual representation of what more bit-depth (the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit scans, for example) really means.

Nods to the Canon site that it comes from, with an extremely geeky explanation of all the details…  but for the visually oriented un-geeky amongst us, this says it all.

-Ted Dillard

OK kids- every once in a while you’re going to get some noise or aliasing- that nasty pronounced red, green or blue fringing on sharp edges of detail like hair and twill patterns- or the colored grainy stuff you see in shadows when the ISO is a little too high.  Here’s a secret trick to fix it.

-Ted Dillard

We’re pretty good at having answers, and when we don’t, finding them… not to tip our hands or anything, but here’s a little flowchart we use a lot. You know… when nothing else works. Which is hardly ever. …no, really!  

(Nods to coupdegrace!)

For most of us who’ve used our own studio or darkroom, it can be a place devoted solely to work. It can be a haven, a respite from the distractions of the day; it can be a place where you take the phone off the hook, close the door, turn the music on, and concentrate on your work. The darkroom and the studio are a way to shut the world out.

The computer, however, is just the opposite. The machine on your desk is a portal to the entire world. It is anything but a refuge—it is a doorway to endless varieties of distraction.

In a great story by Louis Lesko titled, “Are We Better Off?” from the magazine Digital Photo Pro, (July 8, 2005), Louis talks about working on a print for hours, only to produce nothing usable. He was being constantly distracted by surfing the web, emails, his cell phone, IM, and who knows what else. He then came in to the studio fresh, took virtually everything off the hook, and in about half an hour produced a perfect print.

Louis offered a guideline of productive working habits, which I’ve amended here. If you follow these guidelines and are aware of the problem, you’ll get more and better work done in less time.

Working on a Computer: Rules to Live and Work By
Courtesy of Louis Lesko (“Are We Better Off?” from Digital Photo Pro, July 8, 2005)

1. Check email only three specific times a day. (i.e., morning, after lunch, before leaving studio).
2. Cancel all email alerts subscriptions.
3. Turn off cell phone during non-business hours. Not silent, OFF.
4. Set time limit on Internet browsing.
5. If you exchange email with someone more than twice about the same subject, pick up the phone.
6. Get in touch with new contacts by phone only.
7. Take one day a week off. No computer, no phone. (To quote Louis, “Trust me—all that crap you think you’re missing will all be there the following day.”)

Lou Lesko’s GREAT site is here.

Even better, why not do exactly what you would do in a darkroom? Why not set up a nice quiet area to work, where there are no distractions? How about a dedicated workstation with a printer that has no access to the web? It’s a crazy idea, but maybe crazy enough that it might just work. Hmmm.

Back in the 1980s, it was CB radio (good buddy) that gave us an endless stream of useless information to distract us. Thankfully, CB radio has all but left the public consciousness. I think it’s safe to say that the Internet, cell phones, IM, and email are not going away soon. We must learn to work with them, not in spite of them.

(Excerpt from Raw Pipeline- courtesy of Ted Dillard -Lark Books)

We use Bridge constantly to sort and classify files, (and we work with a whole lot of files).  The Collections feature in Bridge is incredibly powerful.  It allows you to rate or classify a number of files across several locations and then display them in one group, as if all those files from all over the place are sitting in one nice little folder.  Here’s the fun part: You can make the Collection, and then actually move the Collection to another workstation.  This is a wonderful thing if you’re storing files on a network or a RAID with several systems accessing them…

Here’s how it works:

Go into the your User folder, find the Application Support folder. You’re looking for a file that looks like this: yourfile.filelist. Move that file from one computer to the other, and that will move the collection too.  Here’s a look at where it lives-

-Ted Dillard

shhhh. don’t tell anyone.