tony_wellington

<p>The jagged lines simply show you where the images have been merged by the Auto-Align function. After Auto-Align Layers, click on Auto-Blend Layers (immediately below). Then, if you're happy, merge the layers so it becomes one image. Sometimes, depending on how big or small the image is on your screen, those white lines may still appear, but when you print a merged stitched copy the lines won't be there.</p>

<p>Ah, Dan, you misunderstand. I stated that one can create settings in ACR which can be applied to every photo opened in ACR. You can bookmark a range of these. Thus every photo in a batch can have the same adjustments, just like an in-camera settings option. <br>

By the way, I do work as a professional photographer. I don't use any in-camera settings. I do work in batches sometimes. I preview my photos and sort in View NX. But I only make adjustments via ACR and PS. It just doesn't make sense to me to use the camera to make alterations which can effectively be made better, more delicately and effectively in post production (ie ACR & PS). You're all welcome to disagree. But to my mind, it's always better to see what basic material you're working with (what you've actually shot) then decide how to enhance it, rather than enhance it roughly at the time of shooting.</p>

<p>Seems to me that in-camera presets tend to make all one's images look the same. Why not shoot RAW, then consider each image on its merits through ACR or LR? The huge range of image-tweaking options in ACR goes way beyond anything the camera can do, and can be fine-tuned for each image. Store all your pics as RAW files, then you only need to bother adjusting them if and when you open them up in PS or LR.</p>

<p>However, as noted above, one can always generate a preset profile in ACR which can be applied to each image - if you want every image to look similar. Strange way to approach photography though.</p>

Getting back to P's question about what to look out for in the conversion from RGB to CMYK... I shoot and print a lot of

landscape images. When converting from RGB to CMYK my one big bugbear is not the oranges, browns etc as others

suggest, but rather in the greens. Where I live it is high rainfall, pasture and rainforest, and often livid green. I find it almost

impossible to replicate the rich grassy green I can get in RGB when I convert to CMYK. In the end I have to settle for a

duller green in my books. Of course other colours shift a bit also, but the green issue is the one that drives me nutso. Don't

know if that helps you P?

Yes, I agree Sean, that there is a sort of printer "profile" for every off-set printing machine, in theory. But as you also

point out "few can or do this". So, in my experience, a discussion with a printer about profiling for their off-set machine

results in a blank look. Lithographic printers traditionally rely on their eyes and test sheets, making comparisons with

standard charts. Like you say, they don't tend to rely on the "color science of profile creation". We're talking about

technology developed long before computers intersecting with new-fangled computer technology. In the end it's often

something of a leap of faith to go from a computer to an off-set printer. One is very much reliant upon the eyes of the

printer operator. Thus getting proofs and being present for a press check are the best option. My experience suggests

that an inkjet proof is not as accurate as a wet proof for checking colours, but very useful for checking overall layout etc.

 

All your information is excellent, Sean. Hats off to you for taking the time.

I'm curious that so many folk suggest that one "gets the actual printer profile". If you are working on an off-set (lithographic) printing

machine, this is surely nonsense. It's not like sending information to a digital printer. The images are converted into 4 colours to make up

plates (either metal or plastic). The plates for each colour are fitted to the drums on the lithographic printer and off you go. If the plates are

wrong, the results are wrong. But lithographic printers don't have actual profiles, as far as I can ascertain. The computers that design the

plates no doubt do, but not the printing machines.

I agree with Paul above. I've printed two books of photography. They have been stand-alone books, not associated with exhibitions.

 

I certainly wouldn't let the printer or anyone else do the conversion. I do my tuning in RGB in CS3 to get it looking how I want the image

to look. Then I use CS3 to convert the image to CMYK. Like Paul, I have both versions open on the screen side by side. I make some

adjustments to the CMYK to try and bring it into line with the RGB. The important thing to note here is that THEY WILL NEVER MATCH

EXACTLY. The two systems use different pigments. For example, you will never get the nice super-rich grassy greens in CMYK that

you can get with RGB. There will also be shifts in other colours. That's the nature of the beast. Red-green-blue are different basic

colours to cyan-magenta-yellow-black, and in combination produce slightly different results.

 

I have never worried too much about the colour gamut warning. It's never proven to help. Just accept that there will be some changes

between RGB and CMYK (which you can lessen by comparing them on your screen). There will also be some changes when you go

from your screen to lithographic printing. Each printer's own inks will even vary slightly depending on where they source them. Are you

printing on a 4 colour or 5, 6, colour machine? Try not to print on anything less than a 4 colour. You don't want your sheets running

through machines more than once.

 

The paper you choose to print on will have an even more dramatic impact on the inks. Have you chosen a paper and seen something

printed on it? In many ways choice of paper is more critical than anything else you do. Also decide whether you want the paper coated

with a machine varnish (this prevents rub-off where printing rubs up against the opposite page). Varnish will also affect the final look

(making it slightly richer but also slightly darker).

 

I also agree with Paul that it's often wise to get a wet proof. But this can be very expensive, particularly for a whole book. So you might

want to get just a basic proof (probably digital) to check layout, and choose some specific pages for wet proofing so you can see what

the printer comes up with.

 

Finally, ask to do a press check. This means you are able to be there when the printing happens to see the test sheets just before they

run the final print. You can then ask for changes if necessary. Mind you, those changes will remain simply increasing or decreasing

individual inks, or the same with the whole lot (ie increasing/decreasing total saturation). And you're limited by the way the images are

laid out on the page as to what alterations you can make. (If you have two images running across the sheet, changing one will affect the

other.) Even at the press check you still won't be able to make the CMYK look like RGB.

 

I live in Australia, and I've just been to China to do a press check on my latest book. For peace of mind, it's essential. But remember

that an off-set printing process will not match what you get from a high quality photo print.

I've found the lens correction vignetting function to be helpful in these situations. The banding is inevitably in the middle. By making the

corners darker and adjusting the midpoint one can sometimes smoothe out the gradations across the sky. It's a bit clumsy, but sometimes

is enough. A lot easier than pasting in a whole new sky. By the way, is that a dust bunny in the sky? Might be time for a sensor clean?

Tony, you can only work with the colours available within the colour system. Plainly red/green/blue uses different pigments to

cyan/magenta/yellow/black. So the colours are going to shift. The blue in RGB is quite different to the cyan in CMYK, so sky colours are

going to shift, depending on how much black is included. The red in RGB is also very different to the pinky magenta in CMYK. So

expect changes at that end of the spectrum. Do what you can to minimise the differences (by tweaking your colours), but don't expect to

be able to match your CMYK images to your RGB ones. It's simply not possible. If I want a rich grass green in RGB, the deep blue

pigment mixed with the yellow works a treat. In CMYK however, you're mixing cyan with yellow (and a touch of black) which can never

provide a really rich grassy green. In this case I usually add some more yellow to the greens to get them brighter, but they never match

the RGB. You might find you just have to live with the shifts in the red/orange colours, if you can't alter them in CMYK to suit your liking.

Of course, depending on the printer you use, you can make further tweaks during a press check.

I've printed two books of photos. I simply convert in CS3 and "save as" so I can open the CMYK version next to the original RGB

version. You will note a few changes. Most significantly, the greens will lose their impact, and the blues will shift a little. Having them

both open on the screen means you can make some tweaks to the CMYK if you wish to. Remember that your book printer (assuming

it's off-set/lithographic) is working in a very different way to your photo printer. You need to know whether the printer is operating a 3

colour, 4 colour, 5 or 6 colour machine too. Also what DPI it is printing. RULE No. 1 - make sure what you provide is in a program that

the printer can work with - that the final layout is in Photoshop or InDesign or a PDF. RULE No. 2 - get reasonable proofs. Ideally have

"wet proofs" done - which are produced on an offset printer, not a digital printer. These will match the real print result. They're very

expensive, so if you can't do the whole book, choose some key pages and have them done. RULE 3 - Get any sort of proofs, even

digital, of every page before you print to check your layout files.

 

It's a complicated business with lots of traps. So get the printer to provide you with examples of their other books. Get them to make

you up a dummy (plain paper) copy using the exact same paper and cover yours will be on. Most importantly, check out the binder's

quality control!

 

Find out what paper will be used for the text and cover pages. Get samples. Work out whether the internals will be machine varnished.

Work out whther the cover will be celloed, and whther gloss or matt cello. If it's a soft cover book, remember that cello can cause

curling, particularly if they print it with the paper grain running the wrong way.

 

Whew, that's probably enough for now. Don't want to scare you. Just remember that off-set lithography does not produce the same

results as quality photo printing. Do your research and look at other books.

 

Good luck!

 

Tony

Hi Peter. Some time back I had trouble with both the clone stamp. It was only functioning at

minimal opacity, no matter what I did. Same thing with the Spot Healing Brush. On a thread I

discovered others had suffered the same issue. Resetting the Preferences a number of times

fixed the problem. This was confirmed by others. For some folks discarding and resetting

Preferences just once worked, whereas for others, like me, it took a few goes. So try that if

nothing else works.

I agree with Louis that the whole business of screen brightness Vs print brightness is kind

of fraught. I too have an LCD with an iMac, and use a Gretagmacbeth calibrator.

 

The advanced process for calibration includes steps to adjust the screen, but my LCD is

not adjustable, so I have to ignore those steps. The book Fine Art Printing for

Photographers suggests setting the screen white point at Medium White (6500). This gives

terrible results. Other books suggest using Native White Point, which is better. I set the

screen on Luminance 140, which seems to work OK.

 

In the end though, the difference between screen luminance and print brightness is rather

hit-and-miss, particularly as I cannot use the gretagmacbeth to set the screen brightness.

 

I have noticed that there are a whole range of factors affecting print brightness, including

the paper settings and paper that I'm using. I haven't tried the JPEG instead of TIFF trick.

 

In the end, everyone seems to find settings that either work, or which they compensate for,

and attempts consistency that way. There are no hard and fast answers.

I've got 3 books, but there are still times when they don't have the answer I want. I'd recommend Martin Evening's "Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers" because it comes with a useful CD Rom that shows you some basics. "Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks for CS3" is pretty useless. "Photoshop CS3 for Dummies" by Peter Bauer is OK at times, but irritating at others. It often glosses over important stuff.

You know, after weeks of trying to figure this out, I have finally come up with a solution.

Maybe it took posting the issue here to prompt my brain into action? All the literature etc

that I have read suggests working in Adobe RGB and sending that to the printer. But it

occurs to me that printers work in CMYK. The printer is thus doing the conversion. So I

figured I'd save it the trouble. So I converted some images to CMYK in PS, then printed

them, and lo-and-behold, the greens are there!

 

Now it's true that when you convert from RGB to CMYK some greens are lost. But you can

compensate for this in PS after changing the image from RGB to CMYK, and the loss of

greens in the conversion process is nothing like the loss I was getting trying to print from

RGB files.

 

By the way, the other colors are slightly richer too when I print from a CMYK image.

I bought an Epson Photo R290. I work on Mac, CS3 and shoot with Nikon D200. I calibrate my screen. But

when I print, I can't get the greens to replicate what I'm seeing on my screen. All other colours look great,

but the greens are consistently de-saturated and dull. I print with Photoshop Manages Colour, using

Adobe RGB, with Color Mgt off, Presets Standard, Relative Colorimetric etc, on Epson Paper at the correct

settings. Is it something about these new Claria inks, or am I missing something here? Any clues?

If you shoot with Nikon, you may have a Nikon NEF Plug-in on CS2 which automatically saturates your RAW images. This plug-in doesn't work on CS3. Just a thought.

Photoshop and ACR do not read the in-camera settings from your Nikon D200 Raw files.

Photoshop therefore simply reads the basic RAW image, sans adjustments.

 

There was a plug-in for CS2 provided by Nikon that read the in-camera adjustments

(Nikon NEF Plug-in). This has not been provided for CS3 (Nikon want you to buy their

programs like View and Capture etc, not Photoshop, so they won't upgrade the NEF Plug-

in for CS3).

 

So forget your in-camera settings, shoot RAW, then make the necessary adjustments in

ACR and/or Photoshop. You can create default settings in ACR which replicate the in-

camera settings that you were attempting in your D200. Same result in the end.

I and a few others appear to have found a glitch in CS3 whereby the healing/patch tools don't work effectively (no matter what settings, they end up transparent). The solution seems to be resetting all PS preferences - sometimes a few times over. Now I can't say for sure the problem is with CS3 per se, or whether it's a computer issue, but I'm not alone in this problem. I use Mac OS by the way.

All the above are true and useful. If you want to read a longer discussion on the subject, go to www.nikonians.org/dcforum?DCForumID36/19210.html#3

 

Basically, if, like me, you need/want to use CS3 which is far superior to Nikon's CaptureNX, then in-camera settings to tweak your images are useless. Shoot everything on Normal settings, import into CS3 via ACR - Adobe camera raw converter (which should come with your CS3) - and make your adjustments there, then fine tune it all once opened in CS3.

 

I also like Picture Project for sorting, but not anything else. I don't actually "Export" from PP (because the TIFF files for example are limited in size), but rather select photos on the screen and drag them onto my desktop or hard drive or CDRom for storage. They remain as RAW NEF files for storage. Remember that in CS3 Bridge you are viewing JPEG versions of the Raw files. When they open in ACR you can make individual adjustments or else save a preset adjustment.

 

If you open an image in PP, and leave it on the screen, then import the same image into ACR, you can tweak the ACR controls to match what you're getting in PP by having the two images side-by-side on the screen. Save those settings as a preset and you're away!

 

Good luck.

I don't know if anyone's following this thread anymore, but I need to add one last

observation. I still quite like sorting my photos in Picture Project - tho I only sort and don't

modify them there. I then drag them out to save as Raw NEFs and place them in a folder/

CD etc. The suggestion that one can export TIFFs from PP is true, but they are lesser

creatures. This is because the maximum size of a TIFF exported from PP is 1370 X 2048

pixels (to suit a theoretical 10 X 8 inch enlargement). Whereas a TIFF exported from

Capture NX is 2592 X 3872. So I don't reckon it's a great idea to save your work as TIFFs

exported from PP.

 

If you're still out there Deb, rather than buy NX, I'm opting to shoot everything on my

D200 and D80 in Normal (but Colour Mode Adobe RGB), save as NEFs (dragged out, but

not "exported" from PP). When I need to work on an image or get one printed, I import the

Raw NEF into CS3 via ACR where I now have presets that do what my in-camera

adjustments used to do. This saves the whole double-handling business to some extent.

(By the way, I have heard that Nikon are intending to upgrade their NEF LE Plugin to suit

CS3 - one day.) Cheers dears.

Hey Richard, I can only go on what I've seen on my screen. What that shows me is that images which are made on my D80 and my D200 that have in-camera adjustments are desaturated beyond Normal and slightly soft whhen imported into CS3 via ACR (which, as you say, ignores the camera settings). If I shoot without any in-camera adjustemnets (i.e. on Normal), then they appear OK, with reasonable saturation. As the cliche goes "go figure"! Maybe ACR just doesn't like files that it can't read cleanly?

OK, I'm the fly in the proverbial ointment here. I have downloaded a trial Capture NX, and I find it pretty damn ordinary. It's horrible for sorting files (the thumbnails are tiny and I can't seem to make them any bigger), and it doesn't have half the capabilities of Photoshop.

 

Mark, there's something you really need to know that no one is telling you: Photoshop CS3's raw converter (ACR) will not read any in-camera adjustments you make with a Nikon camera. Not only that, in my tests I've shown that any in-camera adjustments (Vivid, sharper, etc etc) cause ACR to actually degrade the image. Whereas Nikon provided a Plugin (Nikon NEF LE Plugin) that operated with CS2 to override the ACR and read the alterations embedded in your NEF files, they are refusing to provide one that works with CS3. This means that, if you want to use CS3 you are forced to first sort your files in a Nikon software program, then export them as something other than NEF files, and then reimport them into CS3.

There's something none of the above are telling you. That is that any in-camera enhancements you do on a Nikon D80 will not only not be read by CS3, but they will cause the image to be more desaturated than normal. I shoot on a D80 and a D200. I have CS3 on a Mac and CS2 on a PC. Nikon provided a Plugin (Nikon NEF LE) that works with CS2 allowing it to override the RAW reader and thus incorporate what you've done in-camera. They are currently refusing to provide a plugin for CS3. The only way to get Nikon RAW NEF images to interface effectively with a CS3 is to shoot Normal for everything (no camera enhancements, such as Vivid or Sharper or Landscape etc etc) and then import them into CS3 via Adobe's Raw converter (ACR). You can then tweak them in Photoshop. The only other way is to buy Nikon's Capture (which is what the rotters obviously want you to do), which will read your camera settings, then export from Capture as TIFF files and re-import into CS3 (which is faster and has many more functions than Capture). Otherwise, go buy a Canon! (Us poor buggers with loads of Nikon gear are being screwed by Nikon's intransigence). I have tons of files saved in NEF that I can only read properly on my old PC with CS2, and are ruined by importing into my Mac CS3. Having said that, the mac is faster and the screen is a winner.

OK Richard, thanks. I tried that. Sorry to dominate this discussion, but I'm keen to sort it

all out. I imported some in-camera enhanced NEF files into Capture NX. I exported them as

TIFF images and reimported them into CS3. I put the NX images on the screen beside the

CS3 images, and the CS3 were crisper and had slightly better saturation. (Sorry to disagree

with Robert above!) Same files, different results. So much for the theory that Nikon's own

software is better at dealing with Nikon camera files. (Those of you who are double-

handling images in NX & CS3 just try this test - import the same TIFF image into both and

make an on-screen comparison. Be interested to hear other results.) By the way, Picture

Project appears to automatically enhance files as soon as they are loaded, whether you

want it to or not. Also I've heard that TIFF files exported from Picture Project are not up to

scratch. The whole point is that Nikon should be providing a new Plugin for CS3 as they

did for CS2, instead of trying to force everyone to use their inferior Capture NX (which

cannot do half the things that CS3 can.)

Yet another update! Sorry to dominate this discussion, but I'm keen to sort it all out. I

imported some in-camera enhanced NEF files into Capture NX. I exported them as TIFF

images and reimported them into CS3. I put the NX images on the screen beside the CS3

images, and the CS3 were again crisper and had slightly better saturation. Same files,

different results. So much for the theory that Nikon's own software is better at dealing with

Nikon camera files.