Perceptual Color versus Relative Color Settings

We are constantly faced with the choice for printing photographs of using either Perceptual color or Relative color.  If you print mostly black and white, like I do, then you easily forget which setting does what.  Paper, ink and time are too expensive to waste, so I have put some references here to resources I use in helping me make that choice.

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Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.

Printing in Lightroom using ICM with an Epson R2400

When you discuss printing in Adobe Lightroom you are liable to be met with a frown and an immediate discussion of how it doesn't work the way it should. There are many articles on the web and in publications that deal with printing. These articles give you step by step instructions with Lightroom and generic printers. Sometimes they even give you information on setting Epson printers.

After spending about four hours very late last night attempting to research the proper settings and match paper and ink to the screen, I have found the magic recipe for my printer. Thus, we will discuss the settings for the Epson R2400 to print in Adobe Lightroom using ICM. First, we will discuss the settings so that you can begin to print. Then, while your printer is working through the image, you can read about the research I did. Note that we will discuss black and white settings in another article as I have found those settings much more intuitive and easy to create.

First Things First - Prerequisites for ICM Printing

ICM stands for Image Color Management and uses what are known as ICC profiles. These are calibration profiles developed using standards from the International Color Consortium. For more information on these topics, follow the links provided.

In addition, your monitor must be calibrated. I use the i1Display2 by X-Rite also found as Gretag Macbeth Eye-One color management. The i1Display2 costs about $250US and will calibrate your monitor only - CRT, LCD and Laptop. There are many web sites where you can send a printout from your printer and have them create an ICC profile for you that I cannot justify more money for printing calibration hardware. This product is the best bang for your money.

You must also have ICC profiles for your printer and paper combination. Epson R2400 ICC profiles can be found on Epson's web site. Download these files and run them to extract the profiles to the proper place on your hard drive. Be sure to download the windows or macintosh versions appropriately.

Finally, your preparation includes being sure you have the most current printer driver. This is important to get new updates and my experience has been this is not done automatically. I purchased an Epson R2400 new in November of 2007. I used the CD included to install the driver. I have yet to receive a notice in windows indicating I have an update ready and I have not been successful determining the version of the software through any of the Epson control panels. That being said, I downloaded and installed the update from the web site and sure enough, it was a new version. The current driver for the Epson R2400 is also on their web site. Be sure once again to choose the appropriate operating system for your computer.

This completes our preparation. Open Lightroom and select an image for printing.

Lightroom Settings for Printing using ICM

Lightroom has a relatively simple interface for printing. Setting up the margins and print space in Lightroom goes beyond the scope of this article. We are dealing with only the printer settings. After setting the layout for an image, go to the bottom of the panel and view the Print Job Settings. Here is where we will tell Lightroom how to handle the color management for our image. Note that none of these selections alter what is viewed on the screen.

In order to print, we first set the Lightroom color management to Managed by Printer. This is a requirement. We will still use the ICC profiles, but we will select them through the printer setup.

Epson R2400 Printer Driver Settings

Next, press the Print Settings button to bring up the printer dialog. Press the Properties button to access the printer settings. In this example we are using 13x19 Velvet Fine Art paper. Set the paper type as shown in the image to the right.

Next, press the Advanced button if you are not already in the advanced mode.


These settings are extremely important. I have not found a reference to these settings in any print book or on the web. I think they are uniquely presented here.

When you open these settings, most of them are already set by default. If not already selected, select ICM color management. The mode should already be set to Driver ICM (Basic) as shown. In addition the intent should be set to Perceptual and the printer profile should be Epson Standard. Ignore the printer profile description for now as you cannot change it anyway.

Now select the check box for Show all profiles. This will enable all profiles on the computer to be available for selection. Use the drop down box under input profile and find ProPhoto RGB. This is the key to printing in Lightroom with the R2400.

Lightroom already uses this color space and although I have not been able to confirm it, if Lightroom is not managing the colors, it stands to reason that the ProPhoto RGB space is sent to the printer driver without manipulation. The results of my prints seem to confirm this is true.

After changing the input profile, the profile description at the bottom should match the ICC profile for the paper you have selected. In this case, our example shows the Velvet Fine Art paper correctly.

Using Print Preview in the Printer Driver Settings

While not required, I am trying to determine how accurate the Epson preview pane is. Thus, I have selected the checkbox for Print Preview. Many sources on the web have said not to trust this preview. However, it appears that the preview will tell you if what is being sent from Lightroom is close to what was on your calibrated (hopefully) monitor. It also appears through trial and error, that the preview will also show the modifications made by Lightroom if you chose to let Lightroom handle the color management. Thus, for now I trust it to show if I am in the right ballpark.

Saving the Preset Configuration in Lightroom

After making these changes, press the OK button on the printer driver dialog and then again on the printer settings dialog to return to Lightroom. Before doing anything else, save your settings as a preset. I have organized mine by paper type, then size of the print and then whether the print is matted or not. You can easily create folders, save a preset and drag it to your customized folder. These presets save the printer settings so they are important. Creating these settings is beyond the scope of this article and will be covered in a later article.

Press Print

We are now ready to press print! If you have made these changes, your print should come out very close to what is on your screen. This is provided of course you have setup your system and calibrated it correctly. I strongly recommend using the printer preview in the R2400 driver until you feel confident you have your settings correctly. While it may not be a perfect translation, the preview will tell you if you are way off the mark.

Research on Printing in Lightroom

After printing several prints using various settings where Lightroom whereby Lightroom controlled the color management, I gave up. The prints either had such bright saturation that Velvia film looked dark and pale, or the prints contained strong magenta hues. Yes, I had the printer set to ICM and No Color Management. I believe it has to do with the wide gamut of the ProPhotoRGB color space and mapping to the printer driver through Lightroom.

The method I presented above uses the default Lightroom color space and allows the Epson driver to manipulate it. This process has provided very acceptable results to me using the various Epson Fine Art papers. I have not experimented yet with the Luster paper and other vendor's papers, partly because I try not to switch often between matte and photo black cartridges due to ink waste.

Here are some of the sources I used to arrive at these conclusions:

• O'Reilly had this article on their Inside Lightroom site
• Killer Tips has this printing video
• Photo.net has this forum article
• Open Source Photo had this exchange on their forum
• Adobe uses this link to various printing articles for Lightroom
• Digital Photography Review had this thread on their forum

If you review these many say to let Lightroom manage the color. A few forums suggest we should let Epson manage the color. However, no one suggests that we set the input profile to the same one as Lightroom uses.

Let me know your experiences. ... Read More!

Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.

My Use of the Term 'Middle Gray'

To keep things simple here, I will refer to the term Middle Gray (or Grey) throughout this Blog. When I refer to this term I am not trying to be scientific and represent a certain percentage of reflected light.

I am merely referring to than greyscale tone that is exactly halfway between pure white and pure black. You might be able to refer to Middle Gray as Pure Gray.

Please do not over-analyze my use of halfway either. I am not trying to distinguish between a logrithmic value halfway between two tones, nor am I trying to distinguish between the relative luminance of a tone between zero light and the brightest light source.

Use the following image: take a strip of paper for each tone that can possibly be created between the colors black and white. This should be an infinite number of paper strips, but find the middle point and take that strip of paper. This tone is what I refer to as Middle Gray. ... Read More!

Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.

What Is Middle Gray?

Middle Gray? 18% Gray? 13% Gray? 12.5% Gray? What do we mean when we say middle gray? Middle Gray is this elusive concept that produces a tone exactly halfway between black and white. The question is why do we see so many references to different percentages of gray? Why isn't gray just plain ole' gray?

Rather than try and produce the exact physics behind the measurements, I have decided to talk in general terms about grey and then reference the plethora of information already on the web about the physics and history. I am going to use middle gray instead of trying to reference 18%, 13% or 12.5% or whatever other percentages different people report. This will hopefully simplify our discussion.

The Purpose of Middle Gray

The purpose of middle gray is to give us a standard tone that is in between all highlights and all shadows. Light is measured in lumens, hence the word luminance to talk about the relative brightness of light. Most light meters measure the luminance of reflected light or light that has come from the source and bounced off of something.

The luminance of reflected light is far different than the luminance of the source of the light. For example, you cannot look directly at the sun, the source of daylight. However, you can look at the sky, the ground, trees, etc. You also know that more or less light is reflected. If you look at a winshield and move to get the correct angle, the sunlight can be blinding. That means the winshield is reflecting near 100% of the source of the light.

Measuring the luminance of reflected light is important because film or your digital sensor receives reflected light from your subject in order to take a picture. In a previous article we talked about the ease of obtaining an exposure using incident light instead of reflected light. However, our goal is really to obtain the correct exposure. The correct exposure to record a given subject is one that would render the tone of middle gray exactly as middle gray. [NOTE: please forgive the use of the term 'correct exposure'. From an artistic viewpoint the correct exposure may be one that darkens or lightens the subject compared to what we see. I am using this term scientifically for now, not artistically.]

Using reflected light of a typical subject would produce an exposure value that would produce that subject as a middle tone. More often than not, the subject is not an exact middle tone. Recall that the incident light reading gives an exposure value that should produce the scene in the same tones you see it - darker in the shade and lighter in direct light. Thus, the incident reading takes into account the luminance of the source of the light and converts it to an exposure value for that elusive middle gray tone.

So What?

Ok, so what? Remember that most light meters measure reflective light. This means to obtain an exposure value we need to measure the reflected light from a middle gray source. Also remember that it can be difficult to determine exactly what source in the subject is supposed to be that middle gray tone. Enter a gray card.

Holding a gray card in front of a subject and measuring the light reflected from the source to the camera gives an exposure value that will render the gray card with the middle gray tone. This gives us the key point of middle gray and the problem with what percentage of gray is the gray card.

Key point: If the meter should produce an exposure value based to produce the middle gray tone on a given film and the exposure value is taken from the luminance of reflected light from a gray card, THEN the gray card, the meter and the film need to be coordinated to the exact same middle gray.

Herein lies the problem. There is no standard that crosses the boundary of producing gray cards, manufacturing calibrated light meters and the responsiveness of silver compounds in film or digital sensors in a computer chip. There are standards for producing each item, but they are not in tandem.

The Solution

The solution is simply said but takes some effort to perfect. The solution is to perform the calibration of your gray card, with your meter in conjunction with each film you use. To be entirely complete, you would also want to calibrate your development process with each film. I will address the methods to calibrate these items in later posts and then link them here.

Other Scientific Discussions of Percentage Gray

Thread on changing measured exposure from Kodak gray cards

Richard Hess discusses the problems with 18% gray

Luminous Landscapes discusses a computer value for grey

Wikipedia's definition of gray

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Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.

Gray or Grey?

My spelling has never been great, but then the English language doesn't always have consistent rules either. As I continue to write about black and white photography, I have to reference the color gray (grey?). The questions is: how should I spell it?

The researcher in me took over and I decided to consult Webster. As it turns out, both spellings are acceptable and both spellings mean the same thing - the color. However, the roots come from different places.

Gray is American English. Grey is British English. I haven't yet found a source that tells me when it changed from an 'e' to an 'a', but I surmise it had something to do with wanting to be different from the Mother Country back when we decided to be independent.

As far as my blogs go, I will use either spelling, but I lean towards using the British spelling. I make no promises that I will be consistent, but at least now we know where the variations came from! ... Read More!

Don't forget to visit my photography web site where we sell museum quality black and white prints framed to last up to 175 years - Outdoor Images Fine Art.