Freelance Photographer Lesson 7 - Asset Management & Processing

As a photographer, much of the information you provide your client relies on your ability to not only record photographs, but record the information that supports your photographs, but also have the means to report that supporting information back to your client so they can caption and publish your photographs accurately. That information will include names and ages of subjects, physical locations of the shoot and small details pertaining to the shoot list itself that you will probably not remember. You have enough to worry about just trying to capture a quality photograph in 30 minutes, so take notes and write them down so you can remember them later come image delivery time. This is where Metadata is necessary for the photographer.

File Formats

We should at least discuss for a moment the different file formats that our clients will be using and expecting from us, and file formats we should consider using. File formats should suit your intended use just as your choice in camera settings suit a photograph. File formats serve a particular purpose and you want to make sure to select the right format.

Unless you are shooting weddings or events, you should always shoot in RAW or RAW+JPEG. By shooting RAW, you can rest assured your original captures are preserved and not edited which contain all the available information recorded at time of capture that is necessary for quality file processing. Your RAW images will require conversion to TIFF, JPEG or DNG and require processing, but the benefit of a quality image from a RAW file far exceed the benefit of a smaller file size from a JPEG.

A JPEG or the JPEG version of your RAW+JPEG capture format use what is called “lossy” compression. The quality and color of your JPEG images are managed by the settings you select in your camera, meaning the files you download to your computer are already processed. You can adjust your camera’s settings to manage how your JPEG images look such as Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast. This may be beneficial to the wedding or event photographer that may be shooting 1000 or more images at an event, but serves little use to most commercial and editorial photographers. Just the shear number of images needing to be processed at an event would make me want to shoot JPEG and save to TIFF when done, but I don’t use or recommend the use of JPEGs. The “lossy” compression I mention is exactly as it states, “lossy”.

The benefit of a JPEG file is the size of the file is small and it is suitable for the web and internet. The consequence to a JPEG image is the loss of information due to the “lossy” compression. Each time you save a JPEG file, the image gets compressed which results in loss of data and quality. Ever see the movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton? Each time he cloned himself, he became dumber with each version of himself, or as the term used today, “dumbed down”. Well the same applies to a JPEG file that is saved over and over. And you’re clients will have a need to save your files multiple times. So if you must shoot JPEG, make sure to save as as TIFF when you get the images onto your computer. 2 Figure 1: Digital Asset Management software. Adobe Lightroom interface.

TIFF images stand for Tagged Image File Format and will be the preferred choice among your clients. TIFF files are larger in size than JPEGs and RAW files. TIFF is a stable file format even after multiple saves, and you can also save a TIFF with LZW compression which makes the files smaller, but it is also a “lossless” compression, meaning there is no data loss as in JPEGs. Once a TIFF, always a TIFF.

DNG versus RAW. A camera RAW image is a file format that is proprietary to the camera manufacturer. Nikon has a .nef file while Canon has a .cr2 file and of course Pentax, Panasonic or anyone else out there will have their own format. By using a camera RAW format, you are limited to either your camera manufacturers RAW file converter and processing software, or you are relying on Adobe to continue supporting your camera RAW format to convert images to TIFF, JPEG, PSD or any other format you may choose to use. If your camera manufacturer goes out of business, or stops supporting the version of your RAW file, or Adobe stops supporting the version of your camera RAW, you may not be able to open RAW files in the future. Chances are this will never happen, but 8 Track tapes and VHS have been replaced with CDs and DVDs, right? You never know, but the one thing that is guaranteed is technology will change and evolve, and there really is no benefit to a proprietary RAW file format that I can see.

DNG stands for Digital Negative and was developed by Adobe. It contains all the RAW data your original capture contains. DNG is universal and considered an “open” file format. Adobe did a very smart thing when they created the DNG file by making a universal file format and it is gaining popu- larity and acceptance in the marketplace. Publishers and printers are beginning to prefer DNG files as the furnished file format of choice and a few camera manufacturers have adopted DNG as their camera RAW format. Hopefully Nikon, Canon or anyone else will follow. So, my recommendation is to convert to DNG upon file import into your image library.

3 Once the shoot has completed it is time to download, edit, organize, process, backup and deliver the images to the client. My studio workflow is the same regardless of whether I'm shooting for myself or a client. In this lesson, we'll walk you through my workflow and discuss Digital Asset Management tech- niques (DAM) as well.

Before we get into the types of software and practices of asset management, you should have a procedure and plan in place as to how you manage and store your library and archive of digital images. Now, the process and structure I use for asset management I can’t take credit for. This is actually something I read in Peter Krogh’s book The Dam Book, but because I found it such a great process, I adopted the practices immediately. It is probably the most beneficial book I have read and I encourage you to do the same. You can find it here atwww.thedambook.co m

It may not be so critical to you early in your career as you may only have 10,000 images in your library, but what happens five years from now when you have 50,000 or 100,000 images? Do you possibly think you can remember all the images you have taken, what date you took them and where their stored on your computer? Also, it is very hard to sort and find images based on names such as birchtree.tif or bluehouse.tif because you may have 50 different birchtree.tif files and 150 different bluehouse.tif files with different versions of the image name. You need to have a structure and the process I use is what is called a folder hierarchy. It begins with a folder at the top of the hierarchy titled with the year, for example 2010. Within that folder contains two sub folders. One titled Clients and one titled RAW. Within those two folders are the sub folders for that photographic year. Then each year beginning January first, I create a new folder at the top of my hierarchy and begin the process over again.

My client folders contain sub folders based on the client name. As I may shoot 4-5 assignments each year for a particular client, I need to organize these shoots, so each assignment within a Client folder is organized by job number and assignment name. So for each assignment or job order I receive from a client, a job number is generated in my Fotobiz software that I apply to the folder name for record keeping and good business practice. So, the title of my sub folder may be titled 162_assignment name. And then, I have two sub folders that contain the DNG files and the "Client Selects", which we'll talk about shortly. The DNG files are not edited while the Client Selects are edited and saved as tif files.

My RAW folders contain a hierarchy as well and the folders are titled as RAW_001, RAW_002 etc. But they are created as a hierarchy that include sub folders based on the date of the shoot and generate 4 GB worth of photos. So a typical sub folder will be named by "year_month_day_-image number" or look something like this, 100224-001, which is 2010, February 24th followed by the image number. The reason I create folders with 4 GB (gigabits) of information is for burning to DVD. DVDs hold 4.6GB of information, so by keeping folders at this size, each time a folder fills up, the folder gets burned to a DVD for archiving. This is really a simple organization strategy that works.

As soon as I return to the studio it is time to download and secure the images to the computer. I recommend having some type of file browser for your asset management such as Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom, or perhaps you use iPhoto, Aperture or something else. Regardless of your software, the practices should be the same. I use Lightroom for importing images into folders and I create catalogs of these 4 Figures 2, 3, 4: These images show my folder structure in their heirarchy. Figure 2 on the left shows the structure by year. Figure 3 in the center shows the heirarchy used for my client files or assignments. Figure 4 on the right shows how I manage my personal folders which are titled RAW but also show the subfolders within the heirarchy. files within Lightroom. The benefit of Lightroom for importing is you can import images, convert to DNG and Keyword or Tag images using Metadata that you create with custom presets that get applied to the images all in one command. By the time the images are imported and saved on your computer, they are essentially ready for their archival state, unless of course you decide to make adjustments to the DNG files.

If you are not familiar with Metadata, it is quite simply information that is contained within the images that are specific to the image. Metadata contains the camera settings used at the time of capture, but also contains information that you assign to the images by using available IPTC fields. Within these fields you can title, caption, copyright, add locations, add photographer contact info and just about anything else that is important to the image.

Once the images are in their Lightroom catalog, you’ll want to “save metadata to file” which embeds the information you just entered within the original file. Every image I deliver to my clients has the caption, subject, location, copyright, contact info and rights usage information embedded within the file. This saves me having to send a separate note or email describing what is in the image, as all editorial clients need to caption the images for their article based on the information you provide them.

5 Asset Management Software

The professional photographer should have some type of asset management software. Perhaps you’re using something already, or perhaps you’re in the market to purchase. A few that come to mind are Adobe Lightroom, ACDsee Pro 3, Apple Aperture, Fotobiz and Fotoquote and even Photoshop allows you to manage your assets, and there are many more out there. I use Adobe Lightroom which makes it quite easy to import images and information into your catalogs. The learning curve of Lightroom isn’t that steep so you if haven’t used it before, you should make quick time of learning it (providing you’re familiar with Photoshop), and of course like anything else on the market, you can always purchase a book to assist you or take another class at PPSOP.

If you are looking for something more powerful and robust such as database driven software, they are available on the market and a couple are iView Media Pro by Microsoft which is now Expression Media or Extensis Portfolio. I use Extensis Portfolio for managing my archives, but these are quite bulky pro- grams and have a steep learning curve associated with them and may not be most beneficial to the editorial and freelance photographer if you are using good asset management strategies as I’ve mentioned earlier, but Lightroom should be more than sufficient for your needs. The true realm of DAM is really outside the scope of this class, but if you are interested in learning more about it, I highly recommend Peter Krogh’s, The DAM Book as I’ve already mentioned. Some of the processes I use were adopted from the methods described in his book. Well worth the investment and a read.

Figure 5: Adobe Bridge interface

6 However, any of the software that I mentioned work by creating what is called a catalog. A catalog is really a separate folder of your images. The catalog is basically a “virtual” copy that contains a second version of your original images that include “thumbnails” or low resolution previews of the originals, so you really aren’t working on your original images unless you choose to either save data to the original files or edit the original image in photo editing software. A catalog is saved to a separate folder of your choice, so the catalogs I have for Lightroom are saved to a “Lightroom catalogs” folder, while I do the same for my Extensis catalogs. You can create multiple catalogs as you store them on different volumes otherwise known as hard drives. I have a catalog for my working files which stay on my NAS (Network Attached Storage) or the C:Drive of my computer, and I have multiple catalogs of my backups which are stored on external hard drives. Each catalog is named based on the hard drive they are stored on such as “WD-My Book” which is Western Digital, or “WD-TB” which is my Western Digital Terabyte drive. You can have as many catalogs as you see fit for your workflow.

Figure 6: A screen capture of the interface of Adobe Lightroom during the import stage. Lightroom allows me to convert the images to DNG on import, rename files to my custom naming scheme, add keywords and my contact / copyright information as well. Once the images are imported, all I have to worry about is color balancing my files and chosing my selects and maybe captioning the files for my clients.

Importing Images

This is the stage that we prepare our files for editing. As I mentioned, I use Lightroom to manage my imports and libraries, while I use Extensis Portfolio to manage my archives. Importing images is more of a function within Lightroom that allows you to import not only your images, but also Metadata into the catalogs. You can use Adobe Bridge as well, but you’re not really importing anything because the files are

7 contained on your computer and not within a catalog. You can however keyword, caption and rename files in Adobe Bridge and additionally have presets as well just as you can in Lightroom and the information you enter will be attached to the original image and not the preview of an image within the catalog. I have created Metadata templates based on the information that I most often use or am most likely to import that I use within my Master template. The information within my Master is imported for every image whether it’s personal or professional and it contains my contact information and my copyright information. Custom information that is imported based on the assignment or image can be added within the available fields just before import, seeFigure 6.

During Import it may be wise to copy files to an external hard drive as well. It may be a few days before you can get to your processing and you’ll need your compact flash cards free and clear of images so you can continue shooting in the event you have more assignments. Although the images may not be processed, they are at least temporarily backed up the event of drive failure. Once you process your images you can just copy the processed versions from your computer to your external hard drive and overwrite the folder so your backup is now current.

Editing & Rating Images

Once the files are imported and keyworded it is time to edit and choose your photographer selects. The editing process requires complete honesty with yourself. Images that are blurry, poorly composed or poorly expressed from your subject such as their eyes closed should be deleted. Don’t bother saving images that are “b” sides at best. Why waste the hard drive space on something that will never be satisfactory

Figure 7: Selecting and rating images wihin Adobe Bridge. As shown above, the highligted image is rated as a 3 star and color coded in yellow as a Photographer Select. 8 for use? Images that are not exposed perfectly are ok to save because these are easily corrected, within reason of course. An image that is 3 or more stops off of correct exposure should be deleted (in my humble opinion), because no image editing software is going to correct for that amount of exposure loss.

Rating your images should be an important part of your workflow, and you should have a procedure here as well. Your images should be rated on a scale of 1-5 as the software permits. The best images should be a 5 and the “not as good” images should be a 1. You should have many more images rated as a 1 than you do a 5. I have very few 5 rated images. Here again, this is where you need to be completely honest with yourself.

Selects are images that I choose that will either make it into my portfolio if its a personal shoot, or images that will go to the magazine or client for publication. As I’m choosing my selects I will flag the images within Lightroom or Bridge as shown in Figure 7 for easy retrieval and processing. By labeling and rating my images I can later sort them based on their Attribute. Lets say I have a trade magazine that needs a cover image from my archive, I can later sort through the images and find all 5 star rated images based on their attribute as I prefer to license the best images as opposed to the worst images.

The images I choose as selects are then processed for spots, blemishes, minor exposure and white balance corrections within Lightroom. For the heavy stuff such as color correction and retouching, CMYK conversion or sharpening I use Photoshop. But if I’m only delivering DNG files to the client, I keep my processing to Lightroom.

It’s quite common for me to have about a 10% success rate on my images. Meaning, for every 100 images I photograph, I’m delivering about 10 to my client. You may think that this is a very low number, but here again you need to be critical of yourself and your work and only deliver the very best to your client.

Back Up Strategies

The images you create as a professional are the lifeline to your income, and you should treat them with care. Probably one of the most irresponsible things a photographer can do is not have a backup strategy for their images. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, but it needs to be redundant. Redundancy means having the same information located in multiple locations.

I have working images that remain on my computer for one year, then they get moved to a permanent location, which is an external hard drive. However, after every import, my images are immediately copied to an external hard drive, which leaves me with two locations for my images should the hard drive on my computer fail. The images that are located on the external hard drive are copied to a second hard drive that is stored in another location off site, which is my home, as my home and studio are separate. This gives me three copies of my files, but I’m not done yet. Once a RAW folder in my hierarchy is full with

9 4GB of information, I burn that folder to a DVD and file it in my DVD library, which gives me four copies of my files. Every professional shoot I do gets burned to DVD and saved within the job folder, so my assignment images are copied to DVDs as well.

One thing for certain is hard drives will crash and burn at some point. The chance of multiple hard drives crashing at the same time are pretty slim, but in the event a catastrophe such as this happening, you have your images burned to DVD and stored within a jewel case keeping them safe.

You have options for backup strategies such as software like Retrospect, Nero, Memeo, Time Machine or use scheduled backups from the operating system of your computer. Many external hard drives and Network Attached Storage (NAS) come with a free trial of backup software, or the manufacturers even give you a version of the software with your purchase. You can also invest in RAID units to create redundancy across your archive, but your getting into something that requires an IT guy or gal to manage because of the complexity of these units.

Scheduling backups with software makes it easy as it happens behind the scenes based on your scheduling demands but they may use a form of encryption or may copy entire volumes. You can schedule backups to occur every Sunday night at Midnight for example so you never loose computer time wait- ing for files to backup. I however prefer to stick with the simple route of copying my files by dragging / dropping them onto my hard drives as I can see and feel confident my files were copied ok without -en cryption, and when I have to call up an image from my archive, I don’t have to restore an entire volume. I prefer to control my process, and I’m a control freak, what can I say?

Processing Images

Every professional photographer needs to understand color management to some degree and how to process images for delivery. I am not a proponent of shooting JPEG in camera (as you know by now) and neither should you, so to some degree you’ll have to process RAW images for delivery. Granted, we are in the business of making photos with our cameras, and there are also professionals out there that specifically process photos for print, but there are many variables into making a photo look as we intended it to when it gets delivered to our client or goes to press.

Many publishers will accept RAW images for processing, but they don’t always prefer it because if the photos were not taken as well as they could have been, the publisher doesn’t like to pay the printer to fix the photographers mistakes. So to save face (and we all have to sometime) we need to know not only how to correct for our mistakes, but enhance our photo quality. And believe me, if a photo doesn’t appear as it should in a magazine ad that you photographed for your client, your client is going to call you, not the printer and ask why didn’t the photo that you took print correctly in their ad. And you will need to answer them, or better yet avoid the problem entirely by understanding a bit about color management.

As a photographer you must have some type of software for processing your images. It may be Pho-

10 toshop Elements or Lightroom but at some point you’ll have to invest in the full version of Photoshop if you haven’t already. I by no means am a sales rep for Adobe, but I know by experience it is something that every working photographer needs in their studio. Your responsibility to your client is to deliver quality images and although we strive to get in right in camera every time, we also recognize that some- times it just doesn’t happen, and Photoshop can help us fix mistakes in our work, but more importantly enhance the work we produce.

Magazine editors and art directors don’t usually expect your work to be processed prior to delivery as they have people within their art department or at the commercial printer that will process and convert the images to CMYK for printing. And this is usually satisfactory, but if you’re photographing an interior and you have bracketed exposures to process for exposure blending or high dynamic range (HDR), you’ll have to process the images at least this far as you can’t expect the digital retoucher on the other end to manage the images with your intended vision for the photograph. We talked about this in Lesson 5. There may also be important elements with the photograph that just need your attention before sending them out. So processing to some degree for the photographer is necessary prior to image delivery.

The majority of your work will be processed and delivered in RGB but someone at some point will need to convert them to CMYK for printing. CMYK is not a difficult thing to work with, but I’ve had some work that was not processed properly and just looked horrible when printed and I was embar- rassed by how the images looked, so I don’t always trust the retoucher on the other end, so for some of my clients I will process images in CMYK using their commercial printer’s ICC color profile which is device specific for their environment.

Color Management

Color Management is a term that is quite misunderstood by many, but we’ll try to discuss it in the simplest of forms. Without getting to scientific, color management is a method to communicating col- or across multiple platforms. And what I mean by communicating is one device needs to talk to another device (or communicate) such as your computer monitor needs to communicate with your Epson printer. And what color management does is it allows the image you see on your monitor to look like the image that printed off your printer. Now, the same applies to external devices such as a commercial printer’s inkjet proofer or their CMYK printing presses. We expect a reasonable match in how our images looked on our system to how they look in final product, and that being the printed magazine.

The way that multiple devices communicate with each other is through Color Management Modules otherwise known as a CMM, which interpret device profiles and map one color gamut to another. Apple uses ColorSync as its color architecture while Microsoft uses Image Color Matching or ICM2 while Photoshop uses its own color engine known as Adobe ACE. Adobe Photoshop needs to have its own CMM because it is software that works across both Mac and PC platforms and it needs to communicate color across both platforms, while ColorSync is specific to a Mac and ICM2 is color specific to a PC. Regardless, all of these are considered Color Management Modules or CMMs and all require

11 device dependant profiles with extensions attached to them as .icc. Additionally CMMs work strictly based on mathematical principles and numerical values to manage color unlike the human eye (which is easily fooled) uses its judgement based on visual appearance with no mathematical evidence at all to color communication and matching. The human eye will see something as too blue or too red in appearance when in actuality it may be the adverse.

An icc profile is a device specific profile. Lets take for example a “canned” profile that we download from the Epson website to obtain printer profiles for Epson papers. Each profile will have a .icc or .icm attached to the end of them. ICC profiles are Mac language while ICM is PC language. Regardless of the extension, an inkjet print on gloss photo paper will not appear the same on a matte or velvet fine art paper. More often than not matte and velvet papers require more ink density than gloss photo papers. The CMM needs to know how much ink to put down on the paper and needs to know numerically specific shades of colors and how they overprint each other and this is done through icc profiles. So each paper needs a specific icc profile to manage color accurately because the icc profile contains the information necessary to provide an accurate output.

In our case, assuming of course we have the .icc profile of the intended output device such as the commercial printer that will be printing our images in the magazine, we can use that .icc profile in our workflow to view how color will reproduce when it comes time for press. Printers may use a Gracol .icc or a SWOP .icc or even a custom .icc. Every commercial printer is different and so are the characteristics of their printing presses. This isn’t really critical information you will need to know as a photographer, but it is helpful to the photographer to know a bit about color management and how images are processed for output. The more you know, the greater an asset you are to your clients.

The Monitor

There are two basic ways to calibrating a monitor. The first is by eyeballing it using the display settings on the monitor itself (which I don’t recommend) or by using third party monitor calibration hard- ware/software bundle. I recommend investing a few dollars in a monitor calibration bundle. You can start as inexpensively as a Pantone Huey Pro at about $100.00 or invest as heavily as a ColorMunki by X-Rite that not only profiles your monitor, it can profile your camera, your printer and even create icc

Figure 8: Two gray ramps depicting tonal response. They can also be used to view the dynamic or tonal range of a camera. These are easily created in Photoshop, but can also be purchased from Kodak as reference charts to be used within your photography.

12 profiles for you at a cost of about $400.00. In my studio I use the Pantone Huey which I purchased in 2006 for about $75.00 and it does a great job and is simple to use.

Monitor calibration edits a computer monitors characteristics and brings it to a reference point based on white point (the color of white); white luminance (the brightness of white); gamma (a curve related to the eye’s non-linear response to light); black point (the darkest black a monitor can display); gray balance (the neutrality of grays); and tonal response (how evenly a gray ramp runs from white to black as shown in Figure 8. It takes a measuring device otherwise known as a “Colorimeter” that comes with your software package to perform these functions. By calibrating a monitor you are changing the be- havior of the monitor.

For example, if you have a monitor that is calibrated too bright, you will be compensating for the brightness of your monitor by making your images darker. So when you run your image to print, it will print very dark because you had the brightness of your monitor set too high. This is actually a very common problem when it comes to printing. The eye naturally favors something bright because whatever it is we are looking at becomes easy to view or read, such as preferring the detail we can see in the darker areas of our images. However, just because we like how it looks on our monitor doesn’t mean it is correct. This is why monitor calibration is probably the most important step to color management for the photographer.

Lastly, when it comes to color, it is not advisable to trust the color on your laptop monitor. At the time of this writing laptop monitors are capable of 6 bit color which isn’t very much color depth and not very accurate. Save the processing and production of your image files for the studio on either your CRT or LCD. And when purchasing a monitor, I recommend monitors that are large gamut color or SWOP or GRACOL certified. Check the manufacturers specs when purchasing them. You’ll have to spend more money for these monitors, because it’s a safe bet that a $150.00 monitor will not suit your needs.

Installing Profiles

Whether you are downloading profiles for a specific paper from the manufacturers website or requesting the icc profile of a commercial printer, you’ll have to install them on your system. When it comes time to install a profile on your system, you’ll want to follow the below directories on your system and select the proper directory I have listed to match your operating system.

Macintosh OS9. In the System Folder, there is a folder called ColorSync. All ICC profiles are placed here. One nice feature of OS9 was that profiles were automatically placed in this correct folder when a user dragged and dropped any ICC profile directly on top of the System Folder.

Macintosh OS X. Macintosh Hard Drive -> System->Library->ColorSync->Profiles

13 Or:

User->Library->ColorSync->Profiles Profiles placed here are available only to the current logged-in user so if you and your spouse share a computer, you may want to use this method.

Windows98: C:\Windows\System\Color

Windows XP: C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Driv- ers\Color Figure 9: Adobe RGB 1998 Color Space Color Space

The majority of your work and images will be produced (or should be) using Adobe RGB (1998). Hopefully (assuming) you are photographing in RAW, your processing workflow should be setup around Adobe RGB (1998). sRGB is a non suitable color space for what we are doing as photographers. It is really only satisfactory for images that will be used for the web. ProPhoto RGB is a very suitable color space, and should be used for images going to an inkjet only. Ep- son printers can encompass the full gamut of ProPhoto RGB which makes it a very suitable color space for fine art prints, Figure 10: sRGB Color Space in color. The but not work going to commercial or editorial clients. white space around the color space depicts the Adobe RGB(1998) color space. ProPhoto RGB should not be used for images you have shot on assignment. The reason it is such a large color space in comparison to CMYK that the limitations of a CMYK printing press will never come close to obtaining the color gamut of ProPhoto RGB. And since most of the images we capture for our clients will be going to a CMYK offset printing press, ProPhoto RGB is overkill. Adobe RGB 1998 should really be your standard.

Once you get your intended icc profiles loaded onto your system, you’ll want to setup Color Preferences within Photo- shop. You’ll want to do this so your Working Space matches the color profile of your intended output. This is a part within the “color management” workflow. By setting up Color Pref- Figure 11: ProPhoto RGB shown in white, Adobe RGB (1998) shown in color. erences within Photoshop you enable yourself to view your 14 Figures 12, 13, 14: Color Preferences within Adobe Photoshop. images with the proper profile embedded, but also alert you to images that do not have your intended profile associated with them.

Color Management & Preferences in Photoshop

By setting up color management preferences in Photoshop, we are taking responsible steps at managing color in our workflow, and you’re not limiting your working space to only one color space. You can still work in any color space you desire. All we are doing is setting up our preferences to match a workflow that suits our needs, and Photoshop will prompt us when profiles are a mismatch and ask us what we prefer to do.

To setup your color management preferences within Photoshop go to Edit > Color Settings as shown in Figure 12. From here you’ll want to select your preferences and profiles. Figure 13 shows you how I have my preferences setup and you’ll want to set yours up using “Custom” in the settings and then select from the drop down menus. If you intend to work in Adobe RGB (1998) for the majority of your work as you should for the work you’ll be doing, you’ll want to select Adobe RGB for your default RGB. I leave mine set to Adobe RGB 1998 as the majority of my commercial work gets converted to CMYK and my fine art work gets converted to duotone, tritone and quadtones which require no color space. I also work in CMYK quite extensively so my default color space for CMYK is a custom icc specific for the commercial printing company that I process my CMYK images for. You’ll also want to check the boxes “Ask When Opening” as I have circled in red in Figure 12. By selecting these boxes, the greater benefit of having color management policies set in Photoshop is you are alerted to profile mismatches when opening your images as shown in Figure 13. This is important if you intend to work in ProPhoto RGB but the embedded profile is Adobe RGB or even worse sRGB. Figure 14 shows you the warning you’ll get with a profile mismatch and this will ensure you don’t spend an hour working on image to make it perfect and come to find out your print isn’t as you intended.

15 Soft-Proofing

Soft-Proofing in Photoshop is profile based color management and a popular way to view your images in a color space that will be used for output such as your printer profile specific to the paper you’ll be using or the icc profile of the printer that will be reproducing your images. The Soft-Proofing function simulates how your images will look based on the monitor profile and the printer or output profile of whoever’s output device your images will be run on. I hear all too often in some of the forums I chat in of photographers sending their images off to be printed and then coming back looking much different than intended.

Figure 15: The first step to Soft-Proofing in Photoshop. Make a Duplicate of your image by going to Edit > Duplicate. Then with your Duplicate selected go to View > Proof Setup > Custom as shown above.

Figure 16: Step 2 is to select the custom profile you intend to use such as your inkjet printer profile or output profile at the lab you have your photos processed at. I have chosen the custom icc for the commercial printing company I process images for. Remember, all theses profiles are loaded on your system as I explained earlier in the lesson. You may have to retrieve the profile from your output source or ask what profile they use, but you’ll have to load it onto your system as explained earlier to get them to appear in the Soft-Proof function.

16 Figure 17: Step 3 is to compare your original image next to the Soft-Proofed image. The image here on the left is my original while the image on the right is the Soft-Proofed version. From here I could make any necessary color corrections to the Duplicate Soft-Proofed version to match color back to my original.

Soft-Proofing is good practice for any part of your workflow whether you’re running fine art prints for yourself, proofing images for your clients to your inkjet or sending images off the publisher or printer. As good a tool as Soft-Proofing is, it will by no means give you a perfect match to the intended output, but it will be close enough that you can make some informed decisions on how your color will look. There are just too many other variables that come into play that will affect how color looks at time of output such as transmissive versus reflective viewing conditions, meaning your monitor compared to a

Figure 17: If using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, Step 1 is to select your images for contact printing in Adobe Bridge. By selecting the images you want printed (using shortcut Control > Click for PC; Command > Click for Mac you can select your images for printing). Once selected you go to Tools > Photoshop > Contact Sheet II as shown in this Figure.

17 Figure 18: The resulting contact print of Figure 17 opened and created in Photoshop. print or printed magazine. Different printers with different inksets or press conditions will additionally affect how your color reproduces. As much science that plays a role in color management, much of it is theory, and my colleagues and I have a saying for this. “We are in the business of the Graphic Arts, not the Graphic Sciences”. Color is a tough thing so it’s no wonder why it is so widely misunderstood.

Contact Prints & Guide Prints

Contact Prints originate from the film days when you would process your black and white film and cut your 24 or 36 exposure roll film into 4 frame sections and “sleeve” them in plastic archival sleeves in 4 columns by 5 rows (4x5) which would make a 20 up contact sheet. You would take your sleeved film and drop it onto photo paper and make an exposure on an enlarger to essentially proof your images prior to printing them.

Well, just like everything else, technology has made things easier and faster and Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop are no different. And I certainly recommend running contact and guide prints, if not for your client at least for yourself to keep with your job ticket. With the help of Lightroom or Photoshop you can make an 8-1/2 x 11 print that consists of 12, 16 or 20 images at thumbnail size for visual reference of your photographers selects. I prefer a 12 up contact print due to the simple fact images are a bit larger and not so condensed due to space limitations.

A guide print can be a 5x7 or 8-1/2 x 11 print of one image that is used more for color proofing and review. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop make it simple to create contact and guide prints, and the cost of a 12, 16 or 20 up 8-1/2 x 11 contact print to you is about $1.50 for ink and paper. Once your images

18 Figure 19: Adobe Lightrooms Print Module as shown here makes it simple to create a contact print. Adobe Bridge and Photoshop are automated and do well, but Lightroom makes it simple. There are Presets already created that you can choose from or you can simply create your own Preset as I have done here with my 3x4 contact print under my User Templates. are in their final archive it is not always beneficial and can be time consuming to have to dig the images out of archive if you are looking for a specific image from the shoot.

I run contacts prints of all my selects and file them with my job ticket, and not all but many of my clients prefer contact prints for their visual records and job tickets as well. It’s easier (and usually cheaper) for them to pay me to run the prints than it is for them to have to do it on their end. For something that costs me about $1.50 in materials I sell them for $10.00. The markup on this may sound huge, but in reality I am billing for the time it takes my software to process the images and make the contact print and the inkjet printing time to run the print plus the cost of the paper and ink. Material plus labor come out to about $7.50 per print and the rest is markup. This can be a nice profit center for your business.

Color Correction - Flesh Tones

After you have imported your photos into your catalog, tagged them, keyworded them, embedded the Metadata within the file and chosen your selects it is time to color correct them (if necessary). There are many contributing factors to the color accuracy of your images. Every camera has a color bias, some may be yellow, some may be red or some may be blue. My Nikon D2Xs happens to have a bias towards yellow, meaning most images are a touch too strong in yellow. This is where camera profiles help balance or neutralize color biases, but there are other factors as well such as lighting conditions and white balance.

19 Regardless of the lighting conditions you have to deal with, there will be times you have to color correct for these conditions. Color accuracy is important in every type of photography whether it is an interior, or exterior, a product or garment or copy photography such as a document or piece of art. To a degree there is a level of tolerance with color deviation as a viewer of the photography doesn’t really know what color blue the shirt should be, or what color red the wall or sofa is suppose to be. But when it comes to people, everyone knows what a good flesh tone should look like.

Just like everything in Photoshop there are many ways to achieve the same result. And every photographer’s process is different, however there are rules to follow when adjusting flesh tones. By paying -at tention to the numerical values of our digital image, we can learn a lot about its color appearance and accuracy. The general rule for Caucasian flesh tones is this. You should have approximately equal values of magenta and yellow with the yellow generally a couple percentage points higher than your magenta. Cyan should be 1/3rd to 1/4 the value of the magenta and yellow, while black should be just about non existent. Now, this rule applies regardless if you are working in RGB or CMYK. By setting up your Info Palette in Photoshop, you can review the value of both RGB and CMYK.

It is often helpful to have either your assistant or subject hold a Macbeth 24 Color Checker Chart. The chart is around $75.00 and is necessary for creating camera profiles and helping with Custom White Balance Settings using Adobe Bridge. We’ll dissect this image in Figure 21.

Figure 20: Test exposure with a subject holding a Macbeth 24 Color Checker Chart. 20 Color referencing in Photoshop

Fleshtones - Referenced in CMYK

Highlights - White Shadows - Black Patch. Patch.

Figure 21:

Neutral Values of RGB Midtones - Gray Patch.

21 The image you see in Figure 21 was Custom White Balanced just prior to taking the test exposure as discussed earlier in the Lessons. The benefit to a Custom White Balance is creating a neutral setting in camera that results in a neutral image in both value and appearance. Neutral means equal values of R:G:B, and without neutrality you have a color bias and most color biases will appear in whites and grays. To properly print and process images you must have a neutral image to start with.

By referring to the color information in Figure 21 you can see that the White, Gray and Black patches are quite neutral when viewing the RGB data, while the flesh tones appear to be the right balance of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black based on the values I have mentioned.

Regardless of any color flesh tone whether it is native American, African American, Caucasian, Asian or Hispanic, if you Custom White Balance in camera, I think you can rest assured your digital file will be neutral and contain proper levels of RGB or CMYK values for processing without color correction. With Figure 21 if this were a real shoot, from this point I would have my subject put down the Macbeth 24 and I would begin shooting. As far as processing the images, there would be no color correction need- ed because it is already done by creating a Custom White Balance. That’s not to say I wouldn’t correct for minor issues beyond camera technique such as acne, dark eyes or blemishes within the photo, but these are artistic corrections that no camera technique can correct for.

Printing

At some point you may invest in an inkjet printer if you don’t already have one. By running prints yourself, you can easily add prints to your fine art portfolio, but also add value to your clients and your business. For the majority of images I send off to clients, I furnish Contact Prints with a disk and the Fine Art Galleries I photograph for usually get a guide print of the painting or sculpture. And of course I charge for these prints as well.

Printing is quite often misunderstood as a pain point in the photographic workflow, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re a NAPP member, you can join in the Forums that have many resources available for you if you run into trouble, but we’ll discuss the basics of setting up your workflow. And I must advise you I am familiar with Epson printers only.

I print with an array of printers ranging from an Epson R2400 up to and Epson 9880 large format. The printers I have in my photo studio are the smaller series Epsons, R2400 and 3800 Pro Series with Color- burst RIP, while the printers at the print making studio are the larger format Epsons.

When it comes to setting up your printer, I can’t help you here. My only advice to you is to set it up based on the manufacturers guidelines and instructions. But once your printer is set up (if not already), you’ll have two options in how to print your images. Your first option will be to allow Photoshop to manage your color. Your second option is to allow your Printer Driver to manage your color. Regardless of which option you choose, you’ll have to choose the right settings in Photoshop and your Printer Driver so the color management of your files won’t conflict with each other.

22 Photoshop Manages Color

I recommend allowing Photoshop to manage color. Photoshop’s CMM (Color Management Module) is better than Epson’s Printer Driver and does a far better job at producing color that more accurately reflects the file you see in Photoshop. So to do this, you need to select “Photoshop Manages Color” in the Color Handling Window as shown in Figure 22.

Step 1:

Once you are ready to print your file you can select File > Print or a shortcut is Control + P on a PC or Command + P on a Mac and the following window will open.

Figure 22: Print Window in Photoshop. Selecting which application to manage color. Photoshop or Printer Driver.

From here you’ll want to select the printer to print to. I happen to have chosen Colorburst here which is my RIP, but you’ll choose whatever model printer you have. Next, you’ll go to the Color Handling check box and select Photoshop Manages Color as shown here.

Additionally under Color Handling you’ll see a few check boxes for Printer Profile and Rendering Intent. The printer profile you will choose should reflect the paper you intend to print on. I have Kodak Studio Gloss selected in my example which is abbreviated as shown in the Printer Profile Window as “KPROIJ_paper_EpSP3800(1440)_v1” This is the paper profile that I downloaded from Kodak’s website specific for my Epson 3800 printer for the paper I like to print proofs on and loaded it onto the computer as mentioned earlier.

Next you want to select your Rendering Intent. I recommend Relative Colorimetric for printing photographs and make sure you select Black Point Compensation as I have checked in my example. A Per-

23 ceptual Rendering Intent is ok to use as well, but Relative Colorimetric is really best for printing photos, UNLESS the blacks and shadow areas of your prints are plugging (which is unusual). Rendering Intents manage the way gamut compression is handled, which is something way outside the scope of this course, so trust me on this one and use either Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual. Either way you’ll be fine.

Lastly in this First Step, you’ll want to make sure to have Black Point Compensation checked as I do here. Black Point Compensation is part of the color management system that knows where to start the blacks in an image. Here again, outside the scope of this course, so just make sure it is checked.

Once you make sure all your check boxes are selected properly, you’ll want to click the box that says Page Setup which brings us into our Printer Driver. And we’ll begin Step 2.

In closing for this Step. 1) Choose Photoshop Manages Color 2) Choose your appropriate paper profile 3) Choose Relative Colorimetric as your Rendering Intent 4) Check Black Point Compensation 5) Go to Page Setup

Step 2: Once you select Page Setup, this will bring you into the Printer Driver of your printer. This is where you will turn off color management in your printer to allow Photoshop to manage color, but you’ll also setup you printer to properly print your file. It is here you will choose page size and paper and also create any printing presets you prefer to save.

Figure 23: Epson’s Printer Driver as shown on a PC

The most important thing here is to turn OFF Color Management in the driver. The red arrow shows you what the Epson 3800 Print Window looks like. It simply says “No Color Adjustment”. This will liter- ally turn OFF the printer’s color management and allow Photoshop’s settings to manage color. You’ll also have the option to change the resolution from 1440 to 2880 for a higher quality print, choose the paper that matches the paper you are printing on.

24 I also recommend always printing with the Print Preview box checked. This will give you a preview of how your photo will be positioned on your print and alert you to a possible incorrect setting in your driver.

When it comes to choosing your Media Type, the instructions that come with your paper will often tell you which media type to use for your intended paper. Follow the instructions on the box when choosing your settings for the Media in the Printer Driver.

Once you have made all your selections, click OK and the rest is up to your system. Assuming you have selected the Print Preview box, one more window will open that will show you a preview of how your print will look on the sheet of paper. If it looks OK, click OK, if not, click Cancel and go back into your Printer Driver and see what may be incorrectly selected.

Printer Manages Color

There are times you may want the printer to manage color, or you don’t use Photoshop. This step is more related to setting up your Printer to manage color using Photoshop, but the Printer Driver is still similar if you are printing out of another Application. But you’ll also want to turn Color Management Off in Photoshop if you intend to print using the Advanced Black and White mode in your Epson Driver or print using Black only.

Figure 24: Turning OFF Photoshop Color Management and allowing the Printer to manage your color. This window and its options is the same on a PC and a Mac.

The process is the same as what I mentioned in Photoshop Manages Color, only you are selecting Printer Color Management as shown here. The one difference you will find that you will have to select in the Printer Driver is shown in Figure 25 which is turning ICM to ON on in the Printer Driver. This will enable the Printer Driver to take over settings.

25 Figure 25: Turning ICM to ON in the Printer Driver will allow the Printer Driver to manage the color of your print. Remember, ICM is a PC term and will be a bit different on the Mac.

Advanced Black & White Printing

Another reason you may choose to let the Printer Driver manage your color is because you like the way the Advanced Black & White mode produces your images. And I do have to say, the Epson Advanced Black & White mode does an incredible job with black and white images. Figure 26 shows how the Printer Driver looks using the Advanced Black & White mode and you select it by choosing “Color”.

Figure 26: Advanced Black and White mode within the Epson Printer Driver.

The Advanced Black and White mode really is the easiest way to print a black and white image, but it takes control away from you, the photographer. However, you can still make informed decisions on 26 how you want your print to look, and lets face it, not all of us want the processing time it takes to make a beautiful image. So, if you want simplicity to a black and white image, this is it.

The Advanced Black & White mode allows you to take your RGB color image and run it through the Printer Driver to create a beautiful, full toned black and white image that has either a Neutral, Warm, Cool or Sepia tone and you can modify the Hue of your tones using the color wheel you see in the Driver as shown in Figure 26. If I wasn’t so fastidious with my multi-tone prints as discussed in Lesson 6, this would be my second choice in processing black and white images due to its simplicity and quality.

Black Only Printing

Quite often when printing black and white images on an inkjet, you may see a slight Red Hue, or Green Hue or Brown Hue. This can be due to two things. One is known as Metamerism, which in simple terms is the appearance of a print that may appear neutral under one lighting condition that looks different under another lighting condition.

For example, one lighting condition in a photography studio may be under a color booth that has a lighting standard of D50 or is daylight balanced to 5000k. When you view your black and white print under this lighting, it looks neutral. Now, lets say you bring this same print to a different lighting condition such as your living room that has tungsten lighting and ambient light coming through the window, its appearance is now different and may look green. This is Metamerism and is something well outside the scope of this course, but still worth mentioning because you will encounter it as a photographer.

Figure 27: The Black only print option in the Epson Printer Driver.

The second variable can be the inkjet printer itself. Your print is influenced by the amount of colors your inkjet printer has in its system. Your printer may have six colors, eight colors or even 10 colors. You may have a black and white image that you created in Photoshop, but the printer is still using all the colors to render that black and white image on a print. This is where Black only printing may be necessary.

27 If you are not satisfied with the way your printer is producing black and white images, you have the option (in most printers anyway) to print in black only, which uses the black ink sets of a printer only.

The benefit to black only printing is you get a neutral black and white print as quite simply, Black is Black. The consequence to Black only printing is you take away the ability to produce a toned print, such as a warm tone or cool tone. But this doesn’t really matter. The intent of the print is up to you. And if this is how you want to create a signature style of black and white printing you call your own, than this may be the process to do it.

Summary

I recognize there is a tremendous amount of information in this lesson, and not all of you may be at this level yet. It has taken me many years to get to this level. But I encourage all of you to take what is in this lesson and print it out for your future reference. You may not be here now, but as you grow as a photographer, so will the needs of your experience and this lesson may benefit you later as opposed to now.

28 Assignment 7

This assignment is entirely open. Practice whatever it is you feel you need practice with or want critiqued. If you’d like, ask questions before hand. If you’re really into landscapes and want one critiqued, than photograph it. If you want to create a black and white fine art print, but you’re not sure where to start, ask me. If you want help with using reflectors or strobes, ask me.

This assignment is up to you. Bring back some good work and lets inspire each other! Good luck and most importantly, have fun with this.