I import a raw image into LR4, develop with calibrated Dell U2410 monitor, export as high quality jpeg in sRGB.
I look at the image on my monitor, looks great.
Receive a print from Snapfish, and 15% of the red is blown.
Receive a print from an Adormama photo book, reds look fine.
I look back at my image in LR4, softproof and nearly all the red shows high gamut warning. These can be toned down by using the saturation slider on the red until there is nothing blown out.

Other than always using a high end printing service exclusively even for just family/friend photos, I am trying to understand how to use the gamut warning in soft proof for various online printing services. (Even with snapfish, only 15% of the blown reds were actually blown in print.)
thank you.

The idea is to softproof to the icc profile of the printer and paper of the Snapfish or Adorama and fix problems before you send them the photo for print. It seems in this case Adorama had a larger gamut than Snapfish.

Thank you.

Do online printer services provide an icc profile for their printers that I could load into LR4? Or do I automatically decrease saturation moderately if something is blown out during soft proofing?

dgdg wrote:
I import a raw image into LR4, develop with calibrated Dell U2410 monitor, export as high quality jpeg in sRGB.
I look at the image on my monitor, looks great.
Receive a print from Snapfish, and 15% of the red is blown.
Receive a print from an Adormama photo book, reds look fine.
I look back at my image in LR4, softproof and nearly all the red shows high gamut warning.


dgdg wrote:These can be toned down by using the saturation slider on the red until there is nothing blown out.

So what would be the point in doing that? The out-of-gamut reds aren't disappearing; the rendering is pushing them back in gamut, with probably better expertise than you could manage with a saturation slider in LR.

If you want the colors there, then your only choice is a wider gamut printer. If your printing service offers profiles, then use them to find out if their printers offer sufficient gamut for your prints.

Brian A

Sorry Hugo, you lost me.
When I am in soft proofing, the out of gamut warning areas are highlighted. If I use the saturation slider for red I can decrease it until the highlighted areas are gone. I still see red, but I no longer get the out of gamut warning.

I guess much like not having blown out highlights, I do not want blown out colors. Do I need to get a profile from the online printer company (exists?) or is there some standard way I can do it independently?

Sorry if it may seen I am asking things in a confusing way or repeating myself.

When i calibrated my U2410 i noticed that the gamut extends a long way into the reds, well past sRGB and aRGB. So I'm not surprised you have problems with printing the reds. You could try softproofing to fit into sRGB as i guess that is what most printing companies are expecting.

Interesting.

How would I soft proof (automatically) to stay within the red gamut?

dgdg wrote:
Sorry Hugo, you lost me.
When I am in soft proofing, the out of gamut warning areas are highlighted. If I use the saturation slider for red I can decrease it until the highlighted areas are gone. I still see red, but I no longer get the out of gamut warning.

Many people pushed for the gamut warning not to be added to Lightroom for exactly this reason.

When you're Soft Proofing, nothing is out of gamut anymore. When you're using a color-managed workflow, the color engine is automatically adjusting all colors to be in gamut using the rendering intent you've chosen.

Whatever profile you've told soft proofing to use, everything is already in-gamut for that profile when you're soft proofing, and will be in-gamut if you use that profile to export. For a typical wet lab not supplying their own profile, that would be sRGB. Super-wide-gamut processed data goes in, in-gamut sRGB file comes out. Your effort: Zero.

If it looks fine in soft proof mode, the only thing you have to do is export or print the file as appropriate. Adjustments are not needed unless they are visually needed. If they are needed, do them visually ("I want those purples more saturated," "I want those blues more green"), not based upon the gamut warning.

Most of the issue you're running into is likely that Snapfish is a strongly consumer-oriented printer, isn't tightly managed, and consumers like over-the-top color.

dgdg wrote:
Thank you.

Do online printer services provide an icc profile for their printers that I could load into LR4? Or do I automatically decrease saturation moderately if something is blown out during soft proofing?

Yes you should be abel to get a icc profile from your printer service most have them available . If you can get one from them then only use them for snapshots. This will take all the guess work out of your work flow.

Thanks for everyines help. Sounds like soft proofing is overly complex if one uses a decent printer.
So I should soft proof before I export to srgb?
Or I should ignore soft proofing altogether and simply use a higher quality print lab.

Of course, the problem with the gamut warning from Adobe has always been that it's an on or off thing. It never tells you how far out of gamut a particular color might be, only that it is. For that reason alone, the gamut warnings are pretty much useless, but back in the dark ages of Photoshop, that's all they had and they kept it.

If you have good quality profiles - and that IS the key - then soft proofing is not a big deal at all. The quality of the profile and which application built it, in conjunction with the chosen rendering intent plays a huge part in both the soft proof and the final print.

For most prints, a small to moderate amount of out of gamut colors are of simply no consequence. Use Relative Colorimetric in converting to profile and you'll be fine. The out of gamut colors get clipped and you never even know it.

For areas that are much farther out of gamut, Perceptual rendering intent will sometimes give a better result, compressing all the colors in an effort to maintain separation between them. Less accurate, but often more pleasing.

If you do have access to real output profiles and have Photoshop instead of Lightroom, then you can use the Convert to Profile command and your Info Palette to read the actual RGB pixel values to see just when and where you're going to have a problem, and how big that problem might be. As soon as the pixel values in the converted file start hitting close to 255, you're going to be running out of gamut.

Most online printing services that cater to consumers assume every file they get is going to be sRGB. That's not the same as their printers BEING sRGB. They're not. They just assume every file is sRGB and their printing software makes an automatic conversion to their internal (and often never accessible) paper profile. You, the consumer, unfortunately, never have any control over silly things like rendering intent and have to rely on crude moves like desaturation. But that's the price you pay for 9 cent prints. And unfortunately, even the much maligned sRGB color space is far too large for RA-4 chemical printers and papers that many labs use.

dgdg wrote:
Thanks for everyines help. Sounds like soft proofing is overly complex if one uses a decent printer.
So I should soft proof before I export to srgb?
Or I should ignore soft proofing altogether and simply use a higher quality print lab.

Some printers home or lab will have prints that will come so close to what your monitor shows that you could just send to the printer. In these cases you probably will see a drop in contrast and saturation but not so much as you care.

In Lightroom your edits are done in ProPhoto color space so it is a good idea to at least check if your colors are good in srgb.

IMHO all photos that you care about should be soft proofed for the printer paper combo.

The correct way to soft proof is to edit your photo, then view it in the color space of the icc profile of the paper, edit the photo to match what it looked like in the original edit then send that edit to print. So yes you soft proof to match the proper icc profile then export to srgb jpg.

You'll want to duplicate the image and softproof the duplicate side-by-side w/ the 'correctly edited' image. You can keep or dump the softproof after the printing (I say this because you may be printing on several different papers)

Even Costco's 1-Hour Photo Lab offers and regularly updates the ICC printer profile for each of their printers and even different profile for each different paper type. I wouldn't give my dollars to those online shops that don't even bother to offer their printer color profiles.

wow thanks everyone.

I did download the adorama book page icc profile and compared the LR4 soft proofs with a couple images in my adorama book. They look very similar.

I then made a proof copy and applied some mild exposure and contrast adjustments, achieving a soft proof very similar my original LR4 edit. The side by side view confirmed my original edit appeared nearly the same as the soft proof.

I also compared Adorama's book page soft proof icc profile with and without "simulate paper and ink" option. Keeping that check box checked appeared much more accurate.

As suggested by Peter, the benefit of soft proofing is small with a quality icc profile. Additionally, I doubt that most online printing services offering an icc profile for download would provide a poor one. It is the lack of a profile that would indicate a potentially poor result.

My small experiment shows me that the proof does benefit from mild adjustments that I consider worthwhile for my favorite photographs going into a book or a larger reprint. A touch of extra brightness and contrast returns the image more closely to my original intent and does yield a more pleasing result. The reds were not much of an issue as again suggested by Peter.

Like a monitor's color printer, a printer's ICC also needs to be refreshed regularly to accurately reflect its true state. I would ask how often a particular shop updates its printers profiles.

Adorama's are from 2011. My very simple inspection showed them to look true enough.

Certainly a good point made.

mshi wrote:
Like a monitor's color printer, a printer's ICC also needs to be refreshed regularly to accurately reflect its true state. I would ask how often a particular shop updates its printers profiles.

Wet lab operators should be running control strips and maintaining the chemistry, in which case a profile made last year will still work fine tomorrow. If they're not doing that, then yes, a recent profile is a much more important asset.

Modern wide format inkjets either have on-board calibration (Canon) or essentially invincible heads (Epson) and can use the same profile for years when operated competently. Even on an ancient inkjet, an old profile will work fine as long as somebody's keeping the printer linearized.