Ultra Color Lab - Online Ordering

That is one of the most often asked questions here at the lab. It's also one of the hardest questions to answer. The reason is partly because when you look at a silver halide print you are seeing light reflecting off of colored dyes sitting on photographic paper and when you look at an LCD monitor, you are looking at light being transmitted through red, green, and blue filters. The two mediums present images in wildly different ways and will never look exactly the same. But they can look similar, and that's where color management comes in.

The subject of color management is so complex, you could write a book about it. In fact, a number of people have. One book we recommend is Color Management for Photographers by Andrew Rodney. His Web site is also very useful for learning about color management. Since resources like these can teach you everything you need to know about color management, we're going to simplify the process and cover only the 5 most essential steps to getting your monitor to match your output from the lab.

Not all displays are created equal. At the time this text was written, one could buy

All of these monitors are LCD panels and they are nearly the same size, so why the enormous price disparity? A couple of important reasons are that the more expensive monitors can display larger color gamut, and that they are more uniform in how they render color across the screen.

We are not specifically recommending any of the monitors above, just using them as examples of the wide variety of displays on the market. Look at reviews and get recommendations from other photographers when buying your monitor. Your display is the window that you are going to be judging all of your work on, so it makes sense to get the best one that you can afford.

What if your primary computer is a laptop? The bad news is that in general, laptop screens are designed to be lightweight rather than color accurate. The good news is that it is usually easy to attach an external LCD which is more color accurate to a laptop. You can still work off your laptop screen, after following all the steps below, but recognize that accuracy of your color may suffer somewhat.

Now that you've got a decent monitor, you need to make sure it is outputting the most accurate color that it can. The only way to do that accurately is by using a hardware based calibration tool. This is basically a little puck that you put on your monitor while you run the software it came with. The software will walk you through two basic tasks:

Calibrating - here you tweak your monitors brightness, contrast, and perhaps even red, green, and blue channels to bring the display as close as possible to a state of showing perfect color. The software will probably ask you what to use for a target Gamma value. Use 2.2 as your Gamma. It may also ask you what to use for your white-point or color temperature. Here you can use either 6500K or Native, which is the displays native white-point.

Some displays, notably Apple's don't really give you much ability to change anything except the brightness. That's OK, as you'll be profiling the display in the next step.

Profiling - now that your monitor is calibrated as closely as possible to showing perfect color, we want to know how far off from true color it is. During the profiling step of the process, the software will display a series of solid colors underneath the puck that is attached to the monitor. The puck precisely reads how those colors are displayed on the monitor and notes how far off each color are from what the true color should be. The software then creates a 'monitor profile', which is a file that describes how the monitor deviates from true colors. The software asks you what to name the profile, and automatically saves it in the correct place on your computer.

Software that is color management aware, such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, will use this monitor profile to compensate for the monitors differences when they display an image on screen.

Many people ask if they can get good results by tweaking their monitor until it matches a photo they get back from the lab. The answer is no. We are also asked if one can get good results using software-only calibration, like Apple's Display Calibrator Assistant or Adobe Gamma. Unfortunately these tools are not sufficient for the needs of a professional photographer.

Now that the monitor is set up and profiled, the next step is to adjust your Color Settings in the software you use. Here we will briefly discuss Color Settings for Photoshop, but the same general principles will apply in any professional photo editing software.

The Working Space is the default color space that Photoshop will use when you are editing images with it. It also is the default color space that will be used if you create a new image. There is a different color space setting for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, and Spot color images. For images that you send to the lab, you should be primarily concerned with the RGB and to a lesser degree, Grayscale working spaces. The two most popular RGB color spaces for photographers to work in are sRGB (sometimes also labeled sRGB IEC 61966-2.1) or Adobe RGB (sometimes referred to as Adobe 1998).

If you're new to color management and want the most consistency in the photos that you print, give to clients, and post on the web, we suggest you select sRGB. Many photographers have valid reasons for preferring Adobe RGB or another profile, and Ultra Color can work equally well with any.

It is important to note that you should NOT set your RGB working space to be the same as the monitor profile you created in the last step, or the same as your printer profile. Doing this will severely limit the number of gamut colors that appear in your images.

It is also critical that the files you send in for printing have a valid ICC profile embedded. Without an embedded profile, our systems will not know which color space your files were created in, and will not be able to accurately print them. When you save a file from within Photoshop, you will see the checkbox for Embed Color Profile. Always leave it checked.

At this point, having followed the preceding four steps, you monitor will show a pretty good match to the output that you get from Ultra Color. We now recommend sending in a few test prints through our ProfilePrints service. You'll probably be very pleased at how closely they match your monitor when you get them back.

There is one last step you can take though to get from being 'in the ballpark' to really, really close, and that is...

Photoshop has the ability to simulate what an image will look like when printed on various output devices. In order to use this feature, you need Photoshop version 7 or higher, a high quality profile for your display (like you created in Step 2) and a high quality profile for the printer (and paper) you'll be printing on. You can download profiles for Ultra Color's Printers below:

For the following ProfilePrints categories:	Use the corresponding ICC profile for soft proofing:
Basic Format Units Package Cards Album Prints (non-panos) Proofs Proof Pages	Ultra_Color_Standard.icc
Large Prints Album Prints (Panos)	Ultra_Color_Large_Format.icc

If you are wondering why we are providing two profiles, it's because a specific profile is required for each printer. The majority of ProfilePrints work will be printed on our Standard printer, while larger prints and album pano pages will be printed on our Large Format printer.

After you have downloaded these profiles, you can install them on a Windows PC by right clicking on the file and selecting "Install Profile" from the menu that pop's up;

You can also install the profiles on the PC by moving them into the C:\WINNT [OR WINDOWS]\system32\spool\drivers\color directory.

On the Mac, you can install these profiles by moving them into /Library/ColorSync/Profiles folder.

Open an image in Photoshop and in the View menu, select Proof Setup->Custom.

This will open the Customize Proof Condition, or "soft proofing" dialog as shown below. Initially, configure the soft proofing settings as follows:

Device to Simulate: Ultra_Color_Standard This is the color profile you installed earlier. If you want to proof another device, such as Ultra_Color_Large_Format, you can choose it here instead.

Rendering Intent: Perceptual

Black Point Compensation: Checked.

With these settings, Photoshop will attempt to emulate what your image's color will look like when we print it. If you click the Preview checkbox on and off, you can quickly toggle between the image and the soft proof.

To get a even better idea of what the image will look like printed, you might want to take into account the brightness and color of the paper that the photograph will be printed on. Photoshop let you do this by clicking on the Simulate Paper Color checkbox.

When you do this, your image will appear to get dull and its color may look drab. This effect is so pronounced that many Photoshop experts actually recommend that you look away while clicking the Simulate Paper Color button. After a few minutes, you eyes will adjust to the new brightness level.

Click OK to dismiss the soft proof dialog. You can still turn proofing on and off by selecting Proof Colors from the View menu. The image below gives a flavor of the differences you might see between your original on-screen image, and the soft proof simulation of what it will look like when printed.

Bear in mind that soft proofing does not alter the original image at all, nor does it change the image's profile. It just simulates the final output onscreen. You can use this simulated state to make changes to the color, brightness or contrast of the image, before submitting it to Ultra Color Lab's ProfilePrints service.