Printing: Dealing with the Print of Out of Gamut Color??s

[itsallgoode9]

How do you best approach this?

I've recently run into an issue where this has become a major headache. I'md doing some prints for clients to approve of some Smirnoff bottle labels that I've rendered in 3d. Because of the subject nature, color accuracy is SUPER important when teh client looks at prints. There is one orange color which is out of gamut and the printer is not handeling this well...it either turns it way too dull or way to bright. I got on the phone with Canon (I hae a pixma 9500 mark II) and they had me try using the Adobe RGB (1998) color profile rather than the custom made profile I had been using. This fixed the problem for the orange, but it introduces problems for all of the other colors of labels. (it tends to compress the out of gamut colors on the others too much) None of these problems are huge, but they are enough of a problem that it will keep the client form approving the colors.

Is it just strictly having out of gamut colors that is causing this problem? Do some profiles deal with out of gamut colors on certain colors better than others? What approach do I need to take to fix this? Thanks for any help!

[TommyO]

Re: Dealing with the Print of Out of Gamut Color??

Itsallgoode9,
I noticed you had not received any responses and thought I would bump this one.

Not uncommon at all when dealing with computer generated images. They are capable of producing colors that easily fall out of gamut on many devices, especially in 16 bit. If you are converting these to 8-bit in Photoshop, then expect to get some color anomalies in print. You should convert any images to 8-bit prior to leaving your rendering program.

(That's a whole 'nuther subject and is best addressed by an expert, such as Bruce Lindbloom (Link to Bruce Lindbloom's site).

Give this some thought.... so that you can see what's happening, without having to proof. Adjust your color preferences so that your RGB color space is set to your printer profile. This will allow us to display out of gamut colors on screen as we work simply using the Gamut Warning [Ctrl-shft-Y] keystroke. Since the image will still be in its original color space, we can quickly see what would happen if you print, without ever having to go through the proof cycle. It's just faster. Then we pinpoint those problem colors and determine what it is about their composure that is causing the problem. Anyway, the whole thing takes about 10 minutes.

Printing:
If Photoshop is handling the color management, then Photoshop decides what to do with out of gamut colors. If you allow the printer to handle the color management, then it's the printer driver that determines what to do with those out of gamut colors. Many of us prefer to let Photoshop handle it, simply because we get to tweak some settings in a familiar environment, and its easier to reproduce. When the printer does it, the dialogs can be confusing if you don't use them often, and it's hard to tell what other "magic" the driver is doing behind the scenes. So, it's not a reproducible. However, some printers these days do an excellent job on their own. Based upon what you are printing (I think you said labels), you may also decide to adjust the finer details in the Photoshop print dialog, i.e. Perceptual, Saturation, Relative, Absolute; and whether or not to use Black Point compensation. Most of us know for portraiture and landscapes what we like. But, yours is leaning into graphical artist territory, which may require us to reset our compass.

Hopefully, some of the folks from a graphical artist background, compositing background, etc will chime in and provide their experience or know-how on this one.