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Colour Management

Most photographers understand the importance of colour management…

  • Correctly tagging (ICC-profiling) your image files.

  • Calibrating monitors so that colours are represented and edited accurately on screen.

  • Setting up Photoshop colour management policies appropriate to your workflow.

  • Ensuring profile data is honoured and retained during your editing and exporting procedures.

  • Creating files that comply with your lab’s file specifications.

Photojunction is designed to maintain the integrity of colour management. Its “set and forget” album resources, user preferences and lab settings manage your workflow and will keep your work days hassle-free.

Colour-profiled low-res proxies

When Photojunction imports images to Events it creates low-res proxies for on-screen display, album design etc. The proxies replicate the ICC profile information found in the high-res originals. This means colours can be accurately represented in the Event and Album Layout windows, in the Preview palette and in slideshows etc.

For this to work accurately you need to select your current monitor profile in Photojunction’s Preferences.

Display images accurately on screen

You can dramatically improve the on-screen display of your images in Photojunction by specifying your monitor profile on the General pane of Photojunction’s Preferences.

When you click on the Browse button, Photojunction will take you to the default colour profile location for your Operating System so that you can identify the active profile.

For Mac OSX:  HD : Library : Colorsync : Profiles : Displays

For Windows: C: / System32 / Spool/drivers / color

WARNING: While these are the normal locations, your colour profile could be stored somewhere different! For example, on Mac users can specify a profile for their own account, which could be stored in the user's own User Library.

How to be sure you select the correct monitor profile

On Mac, open Displays in System Preferences and click on Color

On Windows XP, go to Control Panels / Display / Settings / Advanced and click on Color Management.

Once you've identified the active monitor profile, copy the profile name and perform a Search on the file name. Once you’ve located the profile, note the path, return to Photojunction, click the Browse button and follow the path to select the active profile.

Better safe than sorry! Ask for assistance if you need help. But remember, all the monitor profile does is display colours accurately on screen. It has nothing to do with file editing.

Colour management and high-res export

When you create files for printing you have three options:

  1. Export using Photoshop scripting (the file creation is done by Photoshop).

  2. Export using Photojunction directly (doesn’t require Photoshop).

  3. Ask your lab to export the layout files for you (more on this below).

Options 1 and 2 use Photojunction’s High-Res Export wizard. So does Option 3 – it’s just that your lab will be running it for you.

Options 1 and 2 both produce correctly profiled files. That is, both will retain the embedded ICC profiles or convert to your “working space”, depending on your Photoshop colour settings. We recommend converting, as we’ll explain).

Because the Photoshop option requires scripting, you need Photoshop 7 or later. Photoshop 7’s “easy install” does not include scripting. You’ll need to install it separately or do a “custom install”. Photoshop CS and CS2 both install scripting as part of the “easy install”.

The Photoshop option is recommended

If you’re exporting multi-image composite layouts (rather than individual image files) we strongly recommend the Photoshop option. That’s because you will be able to create a layered PSD file. The individual images in flattened files (JPEGs or TIFFs) will be much more difficult to colour correct and edit.

Also, any image special effects you’ve applied in Photojunction will be permanent, rather than being in editable adjustment layers, as they are if you use the Photoshop Scripting option.

Review your Photoshop colour settings

You should think carefully about your Photoshop colour settings and policies.

You need to do one or both of the following:

1.    Ensure that the embedded ICC profile of the images matches your Photoshop RGB “Working Space”; and/or

2.    Under Colour Management Policies in Photoshop’s Colour Settings, select “Convert to Working RGB” instead of “Preserve Embedded Profiles”.

Generally speaking we recommend the “Convert to Working RGB” option. Make sure your Working RGB matches the colour space your lab requires. If you do, further conversions will be unnecessary.

If your Working RGB doesn’t match the embedded image profiles you should ALSO uncheck the “Ask when opening” and “Ask when pasting” profile mismatch warnings. That’s because new layout files created by the scripting process will always open in your chosen Working Space. If the warnings are turned on, and Photoshop comes across mismatches, it will prompt every time the script opens or pastes an image – that’s 180-200 prompts to respond to in the average album!

A more fundamental reminder – do make sure that you have colour management turned on! If not, you will be printing from un-tagged files.

Asking your lab to create the layout files for you

If you prefer, you can export your Photojunction project and send it, together with the necessary image files to your lab. Your lab can then generate the layouts using their own copies of Photojunction and Photoshop. If your lab offers this service there is likely to be a charge for it, but it may be a great way to get production work out of your studio.

If your lab does the work for you, everything said above will apply to them.