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Not Having a good week...Profile Mismatch


Unmasked

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Hi there folks;

In what appear to be one-of-those-weeks, after getting some good and knowledgeable help from one of the learned gents here (Tom Mann) Photoshop now appears to be taking on a semi-independant life of it's own...

Technical stuff first...Running Win 7 Ultimate, Eizo monitor (calibrated with Spyder 3 Pro), have 16 Gb RAM.

Shots are in Adobe RGB, paper profile is set as per normal, rendering relative colormetric, media and paper settings all good (printer is an Epson R3000)

The message I continually get now is that I have an "Embedded Profile Mismatch" and I get three options asking me if I want to use the embedded profile, convert to the workingspace (monitor RGB) or discard the embedded profile. This is a new one to me...

So the question of the moment is in two parts; firstly, why has this suddenly appeared, and secondly, what's the best of the choices to make? I've consulted Martin Evenings book, (Master the Power of Photoshop CS6) without any success.
 

ALB68

Dear Departed Guru and PSG Staff Member
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This happens when you have told PS in the Color Settings setup to warn you of mismatch. Which to use? Probably use the embedded.
Check this article on the subject, http://forums.adobe.com/message/6002194
 
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Tom Mann

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Hi Guys - I've been out of town, on and off, for the last couple of weeks (including right now), and away from my PS computer, so it's kinda hard to help.

However, I should be back home on Tuesday and will try respond then.

Sincerely,

Tom M
 

Unmasked

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Thanks folks. I figured that the embedded one was the one to go with, but couldn't find anything to say one way or the other.

Really impressed with the help I've gotten from folks on these forums, it's greatly appreciated.
 

Tom Mann

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Hi Unmasked -

Sorry for the delay in responding, but we just got back from a relaxing long weekend at Chincoteague, VA, a nice beach and US National Wildlife Refuge a few hours from here.

With respect to your current problem about profile mismatch, the most important clue to the reason for this behavior is your comment: "...convert to the workingspace (monitor RGB)...".

There are two type of color profiles used by Photoshop -- one type (the "working color space") defines how colors are represented numerically within PS, and the other ("device profiles) defines how color conversions are made between how various external input-output devices (eg, monitors, printers, scanners, etc.) represent and store color, and the way colors are represented internally in PS. Unfortunately, both types of profiles are present in one big long list in PS, as if they could be used interchangeably. THEY CAN'T.

Unless one is *extremely* knowledgeable about such matters, your working color space should always be one of the standard color spaces like Adobe sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProFoto, etc. It should never (...well, almost never...) be a I/O device profile. Unfortunately, from the statement of yours that I quoted above, it appears that this is exactly what you are doing.

Hence, the reason you received the profile mismatch warning is because (from what you said) your camera is saving files and sending them to PS in Adobe RGB, but internally, PS is using your monitor profile as its color space, so, of course there will be a "profile mismatch".

As an experiment, you can check to see if my guess is correct by (a) confirming that your camera's files really are in Adobe RGB, and then, (b) changing your working color space also to Adobe RGB. If I am correct, the warnings about mismatched color spaces should stop. If I have guessed incorrectly, temporarily ignore the rest of this message and let me know what happened.

If my guess was correct, then the next thing to discuss is what color spaces (ie, both camera and PS/working) should you use in the long term. It might be Adobe RGB, but just as likely, the best choice for you might be sRGB or ProFoto.

Deciding on which is a bit complicated. On the web, you'll find considerable amounts of personal opinion on this topic. Hopefully, such opinions are based on logical factors such as experience, typical subject matter, the gamuts of your monitor and printer, etc. However, often the people who voice their opinions most strongly often either don't state these factors, or aren't even aware that they are influencing their opinions, LOL.

Here's a short version of my take on this issue.

If you want the safest and easiest approach, just use sRGB both internally within PS, and as the output color space for your camera. It's easy because you never need to remember to do color space conversions every time you are done editing a photo and you want to post something on the web or have an image printed. It's safe because if your monitor is calibrated, you'll (hopefully) never once receive a complaint about odd colors in your images by people viewing them online, colors which change depending on the browser or viewing software being used, etc.

The downside of sRGB is that some extremely saturated colors (or extremely bright, or extremely dark) won't look or print any different than nearby colors / tones that aren't so "extreme". If you have a wide gamut monitor and a good printer with many more than three ink cartridges, everything you do in sRGB will look just a bit less life-like than if you used a wider gamut working space (like Adobe RGB or ProFoto) for all your processing.

Once you move away from sRGB to any other working space, the "ease" factor immediately goes out the door. Every time you are about to post something on the web, you MUST remember to convert the image to sRGB and make a new copy of the file, labeled appropriately. If you don't do this, some people will see your image as you intended, while others with different software may see your image substantially less colorful and less contrasty than you had hoped.

Because of the above, I regard Adobe RGB as a not-very-attractive middle ground position.

Personally, if I'm shooting subjects with deeply saturated colors and a wide range of brightness, I simply go all the way to ProFoto (at 16 bpc). I have to do exactly the same type of conversions as if I had used Adobe RGB, but with ProFoto, I gain a huge amount of extra gamut. In the interest of full disclosure, I also use a very good, extremely wide gamut, regularly calibrated monitor, so it's very easy for me to see the improvement.

HTH,

Tom

PS - FWIW, if I am shooting lots of portraits under well controlled lighting conditions, since nothing is ever out of gamut, I just switch back to sRGB to save myself a bit of work.
 

Unmasked

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Hi there Tom;

Thanks again for the time you've taken to provide such a detailed and comprehensive reply. I'll look into all of this and get back to you in more detail in a day or so. I have some knowledge of what you mention, but as you said there's a lot of information out there that is contradictory or opinionated in many ways.

For what it's worth...my cameras are set to Adobe RGB, as I found the colour space of sRGB too limiting for my work. I'm not certain if my printer (an Epson Stylus Photo R3000) can cope with the colour space of ProPhoto - I don't believe it can - but I'll run a few tests and be back with you soon.

Cheers,

- W.
 

Unmasked

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Still checking the colour range on the printer. Results look promising, but thanks to a rush of work in the past couple of days I'll need to nail it down properly soon. I'll be back...
 

Tom Mann

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...but thanks to a rush of work...

I know the feeling. :-(

However, I did want to make one comment. Your printer does not need to have the full gamut of ProFoto (or even accept ProFoto files) for the use of ProFoto in PS to provide noticeable, if not substantial benefits. This is especially true when one is making a lot of major changes to tonalities and colors (eg, trying to pull good looking color and luminosity info out of deep shadows or nearly burned out highlights).

One would think that the the narrowest gamut in the chain from camera to printer would determine the performance of the overall processing chain. It does, but there is no reason to put the bottleneck any earlier in the chain than you have to.

The improvement by keeping the gamut wide until the very last step (ie, conversion of the working color space to a color space that the printer accepts) is exactly analogous to why one should always use 16 bits per channel in PS even if your monitor or printer only accepts 8 bpc data: the performance of the overall chain near the edges of the gamut, especially in shadows and nearly blown highlights will, in many cases, be improved.

For many years, I only used sRGB because I also subscribed to the principle that the narrowest bottleneck in the chain is all that mattered. Then, a few years ago, I started to experiment with staying in wide gamut as long as possible (ie, use 16 bpc ProFoto as the working space within PS). The improvement was obvious on both the sRGB monitors I was using at that time, as well as prints I made. Even supposedly easy mid-gamut colors like skin were more life-like, but, to me, the most significant change was the sudden appearance of life-like depth in the shadow areas, less banding in nearly uniform areas of sky, and pulling detail from highlights such as patches of reflective oily skin without having to either reduce the overall contrast of the image, change my lighting, or work on those areas separately in post processing.

Anyway, give it a try, I think that once you get used to it, you'll really like it.

Cheers,

Tom
 

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