cgardner
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 p.1 #11 · Colormunki, iMac and black ink... | |
You have the concept of color management bass-akwards.
The printer gamut is a function of its pigments and the paper. The point of profiling a printer is to enable the computer monitor to simulate the limits of saturation printer has. The most saturated red the printer can produce is 100% Yellow + 100% Magenta and it will not be as saturated as 100% Red on your RGB monitor. That's just the way its always been and always will be.
The goal of color management isn't to match the printer to your monitor, but rather allow you to see on the monitor when editing a file for printing how it will change when converted from the RGB working space, as seen per the limits of your monitor gamut, when printed in CYMK.
If editing in Adobe RGB or a wider space you are not really seeing what is in the file in many cases because the monitor gamut can't display it. What color management does is remap the color in the file to the most saturated color the monitor can display and rearrange the less saturated ones the overall range looks the same perceptually.
The simulation is performed by using the soft proofing mode in Photoshop which puts the printer profile in between the working space and the monitor profile, which causes the colors on the monitor to only be as saturated as the printer's inks can produce. The resulting proof image doesn't look as good as the "unfiltered" screen image, but if the printer profile is accurate should be close to how the printer output will change.
Not what you want to happen? To bad, so, sad, that's just the way it works....
If you take a file straight from the camera and print it without doing anything the color management of the printer will do the RGB > CYMK conversion per the built-in profiles mapping the most saturated red, green, blue values in the file ( e.g. 255) to the most saturated red, green and blue hues the ink and paper can produce. If you take the printer profile and using it to convert the file in Photoshop you'd be doing the same thing, because that's what the profile does: describe the limitations of its gamut.
The purpose of monitor calibration is to ensure that neutral tones wind up reproduced with equal parts RGB and a file on your monitor will look similar to mine to create a consistent baseline for viewing.
Where things tend to go south is when absolute faith is put in the monitor calibration tool and it doesn't work correctly. What happens then is the file out of the camera which is actually OK doesn't normal. The person edits it to look good perceptually on the poorly calibrated monitor, which then screws up the printing which would have been fine if the file wasn't edited.
In practical terms the best baseline is your camera. If you shoot a color target on a sunny day with daylight white balance the color management engineered into your camera, computer and printer should reproduce it in a way that looks "normal" in the perceptual sense of looking like the real thing without any odd color casts. The print and monitor will not be a perfect side-by-side match because its physically impossible, but the two seen separately will accurately reproduce the scene to the limits of their respective gamuts.
If the file straight out of the camera prints reasonably well but doesn't look good on the monitor then odds are the monitor is poorly calibrated.
Chuck
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I'll give him a good home on a PC