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Round tripping from Lr to Ps with a custom color profile?


GBNova

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Hi all.

I have created a custom color profile for my monitor and use it in OS X and Ps. Lr uses a different color space and won't let me use my custom space that I am using in Ps. So when I "edit in" from Lr to Ps, Ps says that the embedded profile does not match the working profile and discards all my raw file edits. Is the only way around this to save as a TIFF or PSD file from Lr with my custom profile embedded and then open it in Ps?

Tks.
 

Tom Mann

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Sorry, GBN, but unless you mis-typed something, you've got the basic concepts wrong.

Even though the names of these files all have the same extension, a monitor profile should NEVER, EVER be used as your working space. A monitor profile is a set of computations or a look-up table that translates the numbers in your working space to the numbers to be sent to your monitor. A monitor profile is exactly analogous to a printer profile which converts the numbers representing your image in the working space to the numbers that need to be sent to the printer to get a reasonably accurate print. On the input side, are also camera profiles, scanner profiles, etc. All of these are collectively called "device profiles". To repeat, even though the files for all of these have very similar names, usually *.icc, the different classes of profiles are not interchangeable. Here is a good intro article:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/creativesuite/cs/using/WSBB0A8512-8151-408c-9F79-4A9E9E3BA84C.html

What you should be doing is:
1) install your custom monitor profile in your OS. Depending on exactly what OS your are running, these files are put in different places, and turned on by different menus, so you'll have to Google how exactly to do this for the particular OS you are running.

2) Use one of the common RGB working spaces, sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProFoto RGB as your working space in PS. Since you are new at this, I would suggest sRGB to start with.

3) LR does not let you change its working color space. It's a proprietary space that is very similar to ProPhoto, but you don't really have any choice in the matter, so there really is nothing to change inside of LR ***EXCEPT*** when you are exporting from LR to a PSD file, you are given the option to set the color space of the exported PSD file, so in LR's export dialog box, set it to sRGB (or whatever you selected for your PS working space).

There's a lot more to color management than this, but these fundamental steps should get you started.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - Larry, ALB68, obviously misunderstood what you needed, so please do NOT set ACR's (or LR's) default export color space to be your monitor profile. That is essentially guaranteed to cause you all sorts of odd (and difficult to diagnose) color and tonality problems. Every year or so we a question about weird colors that eventually turns out to be due to someone making this mistake. I really wish Adobe had distinguished color space profiles from input, output, and other device profiles by giving them different extensions, eg, *.ics = a color space, *.ici = input device color profile, *.icp = a printer color profile, etc. etc.
 

GBNova

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Thanks guys. I had my monitor space properly set in my OS, but was trying to use it in Ps because that is what I thought I had read somewhere. This info helps, I think I've got it now.
 

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