Soft Proofing and the Epson Stylus Pro 3800
01st March 2009
A new printer means a new set of profiles and a new round of soft-proofing, of old image files as well as new. The vastly greater paper-handling capability of the 3800 over my old A4 Epson R800 adds to the scale of the task, as do the inconsistencies of quality between different canned profiles - and this first step really has to be made using canned profiles, as I need to get a "feel" for the different papers on the market before bulk-purchasing stocks of particular papers. Only at that point will I think about getting custom profiles made for my chosen papers.
So it's once more into the breach of soft-proofing images in Photoshop - the only app I know that you can do this in...
Here's a short collation of different aspects of soft proofing. All use the same basic procedure, as follows:
With your image open in Photoshop, go View>Proof Setup>Custom and select the icc profile for the paper you want to proof for. Try out Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric, with "Preserve RGB Numbers" UN-checked, and "Simulate Paper Color" (SPC) checked.
Here's the thing: checking SPC will wreck the appearance of your image on your screen, and this is where the work of soft-proofing starts. How to retrieve the quality of the image you worked so hard to capture and to render in your photo-processing software, and which the soft-proofing has just submerged beneath a milky wash, blurring its detail - in extreme cases to a pure mush? That's what soft-proofing is all about. Sadly, but with today's technology inevitably, all the work you've put into rendering your image more exquisitely, ravishingly beautiful on your computer's monitor screen has produced just that - a ravishing image optimised for viewing on your monitor. To get that image to the printed page, will require more work. While this can seem like a pain to do, I sometimes find that when I've done the soft-proofing, I consider the end result preferable to the starting point. Which makes it all worthwhile.
1. In the Luminous Landscape video series "From Camera to Print" Jeff Schewe outlines this approach:
Step 1: Do a "Select>Color Range' with foreground colour set to Black. Set Fuzziness to 25 and click OK. Hit Command+J to get this selection as a Layer, and set its Blend Mode to Multiply.
Step 2: Curves - just a minor tweak to add some contrast
Step 3: H&S - In a new Hue & Sat Adjustment Layer boost Saturation in Master and, if necessary do a Hue tweak on primary channels (R,G,B) as required
2. These steps will enable you to get back the coloration of your image. But it is still likely to appear a bit washed out. To get it back to full strength, you'll need to restore some of the mid-tone contrast that SPC destroyed for you. Also included as Easter eggs with "From Camera to Print" are two Photoshop Actions for mid-tone contrast adjustment/ enhancement.
These tools provide excellent means of returning the "punch" to your image, and making it burst out through that milky film the "Simulate Paper Color" command drenched it in. An alternative is to use Image>Adjustments>Shadow/ Highlight, and if you have Photoshop CS3 or later you can do this on a Smart Object rather than on the Background layer of your image. Then you have the option to reduce the Opacity of the Smart Object to attenuate the strength of the adjustment, and of course will be able to re-open the Shadow/ Highlight dialogue box to refine or re-work the adjustment (e.g. for a different paper-type).
If you don't want to buy the videos from here, you can read how to replicate one of the Actions here, or see another way of doing mid-tone contrast adjustments here.
Another tool in Photoshop (CS and later) that you can use to boost mid-tone contrast is the "Shadows/ Hightlights" adjustments. I stumbled on this one day some years back, while wrestling with the "Green Mush" that often shows up when you try soft-proofing work for the Epson R800 printer using the early Epson canned profiles that shipped with that printer (the later R1-series profiles are much improved). The phenomenon was widely discussed on the web, and I'd just about given up on getting a print of the particular image I was working on that morning, when I thought maybe it would benefit overall and anyway from a dose of "Image> Adjustments> Shadows/ Highlights". I think I'd just forgotten to switch off the soft-proofing, and I was astonished to see that the default settings for this cut right through the green mush to reveal the leafs of grass bending and blowing in the wind in my picture!
Now you can't always - or even often - get what you want from its default settings, but the "Shadows/ Hightlights" adjustment command, with a bit of tweaking, will often help rescue your image from the curse of the SPC. And if you need to localise the effect, you can always apply "Shadows/ Hightlights" to a Smart Object (typically a duplicate of your Background layer) and use the layer mask to paint in the bits you want.
A good tip when you've finished adding adjustment layers in the soft-proofing process is to collect them all up into a new Group folder, and rename it something like "SoftProof - Epson Trad Photo Percep", or whatever. You may find you'll need one Group for all matt papers and another for all gloss or lustre papers, or you may find that some individual papers need tehir own, individual groups of soft-proofing layers. These decisions will need to be made on an image-by-image and paper-by-paper basis.
Jim Stewart
So it's once more into the breach of soft-proofing images in Photoshop - the only app I know that you can do this in...
Here's a short collation of different aspects of soft proofing. All use the same basic procedure, as follows:
With your image open in Photoshop, go View>Proof Setup>Custom and select the icc profile for the paper you want to proof for. Try out Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric, with "Preserve RGB Numbers" UN-checked, and "Simulate Paper Color" (SPC) checked.
Here's the thing: checking SPC will wreck the appearance of your image on your screen, and this is where the work of soft-proofing starts. How to retrieve the quality of the image you worked so hard to capture and to render in your photo-processing software, and which the soft-proofing has just submerged beneath a milky wash, blurring its detail - in extreme cases to a pure mush? That's what soft-proofing is all about. Sadly, but with today's technology inevitably, all the work you've put into rendering your image more exquisitely, ravishingly beautiful on your computer's monitor screen has produced just that - a ravishing image optimised for viewing on your monitor. To get that image to the printed page, will require more work. While this can seem like a pain to do, I sometimes find that when I've done the soft-proofing, I consider the end result preferable to the starting point. Which makes it all worthwhile.
1. In the Luminous Landscape video series "From Camera to Print" Jeff Schewe outlines this approach:
Step 1: Do a "Select>Color Range' with foreground colour set to Black. Set Fuzziness to 25 and click OK. Hit Command+J to get this selection as a Layer, and set its Blend Mode to Multiply.
Step 2: Curves - just a minor tweak to add some contrast
Step 3: H&S - In a new Hue & Sat Adjustment Layer boost Saturation in Master and, if necessary do a Hue tweak on primary channels (R,G,B) as required
2. These steps will enable you to get back the coloration of your image. But it is still likely to appear a bit washed out. To get it back to full strength, you'll need to restore some of the mid-tone contrast that SPC destroyed for you. Also included as Easter eggs with "From Camera to Print" are two Photoshop Actions for mid-tone contrast adjustment/ enhancement.
These tools provide excellent means of returning the "punch" to your image, and making it burst out through that milky film the "Simulate Paper Color" command drenched it in. An alternative is to use Image>Adjustments>Shadow/ Highlight, and if you have Photoshop CS3 or later you can do this on a Smart Object rather than on the Background layer of your image. Then you have the option to reduce the Opacity of the Smart Object to attenuate the strength of the adjustment, and of course will be able to re-open the Shadow/ Highlight dialogue box to refine or re-work the adjustment (e.g. for a different paper-type).
If you don't want to buy the videos from here, you can read how to replicate one of the Actions here, or see another way of doing mid-tone contrast adjustments here.
Another tool in Photoshop (CS and later) that you can use to boost mid-tone contrast is the "Shadows/ Hightlights" adjustments. I stumbled on this one day some years back, while wrestling with the "Green Mush" that often shows up when you try soft-proofing work for the Epson R800 printer using the early Epson canned profiles that shipped with that printer (the later R1-series profiles are much improved). The phenomenon was widely discussed on the web, and I'd just about given up on getting a print of the particular image I was working on that morning, when I thought maybe it would benefit overall and anyway from a dose of "Image> Adjustments> Shadows/ Highlights". I think I'd just forgotten to switch off the soft-proofing, and I was astonished to see that the default settings for this cut right through the green mush to reveal the leafs of grass bending and blowing in the wind in my picture!
Now you can't always - or even often - get what you want from its default settings, but the "Shadows/ Hightlights" adjustment command, with a bit of tweaking, will often help rescue your image from the curse of the SPC. And if you need to localise the effect, you can always apply "Shadows/ Hightlights" to a Smart Object (typically a duplicate of your Background layer) and use the layer mask to paint in the bits you want.
A good tip when you've finished adding adjustment layers in the soft-proofing process is to collect them all up into a new Group folder, and rename it something like "SoftProof - Epson Trad Photo Percep", or whatever. You may find you'll need one Group for all matt papers and another for all gloss or lustre papers, or you may find that some individual papers need tehir own, individual groups of soft-proofing layers. These decisions will need to be made on an image-by-image and paper-by-paper basis.
Jim Stewart
