Color Management Confusion-Photoshop and monitors

Question

Ok, so I am asking this question because I am literally at my wits end with this color management stuff. I have become so confused in the past few days that I can’t even think straight. Anyway, I am hoping you all can help me “understand” how it all work. Let me start with some background information (since I know it will probably be asked)
am a photographer, I utilize Lightroom 4 and CS3 (I know its old but I am planning on getting CS6 soon).
put my pictures on the web that I will assume will be viewed on multiple different browsers.
also will be sending my pictures to print at mpix or whcc. I may decide to print my own but haven’t really made that determination at this point.
have a mac book pro that I work from.
Ok, so I need to get a monitor to work with but I am unsure if I should just buy the thunderbolt mac monitor or get a wide gamut monitor. I have heard so many people say that the wide gamut monitors just messed them up. Also, I am bit confused on the nature of monitor profiles and how they work with photoshop and lightroom. I would assume the monitor applies a profile at all times? I also don’t understand the existence of the prophoto and wide gamut profiles for the mac monitors… they clearly are not wide-gamut monitors, so how do these profiles exist for them, and why would they be useful (if you set the profile to prophoto for example, it is all washed out as expected). Are these profiles “assigning” a profile to the color? I am assuming so because if they were converting them to just a standard rgb then you wouldn’t have the faded colors (correct?).
I just am so nervous that I am going to create something that looks great in Lightroom or Photoshop but that looks awful on the browser, or worse, on a different monitor (standard monitor) and I would have no idea that it looked bad. Or, if I send something to a printer only to get a mess back.
Also, please let me know if I correct in this. If I am in photoshop and I have an untagged image (send via a friend), and lets just say it is really a prophoto image (although my friend didn’t tell me) and I say to assign the prophoto profile (upon import to photoshop). If that truly is the correct profile, the image should look correct. Now consider two scenarios from there: 1) I embed that profile in the image, if I upload that to the web (I know to be cautious, you should always use srgb for web), if the person has a color managed browser, the image would properly appear, because the browser would recognize the profile (in this case “prophoto”) and convert it to whatever it needed to be. But, if it was not a color managed browser, I run the risk that the web browser will just assign a profile, which will wash the photo out most likely, correct? Ok… and scenario 2) after I get the image from my friend and assign the prophoto profile (since that is the correct profile the image was actually created in, although it was untagged when it was sent to me), the image will look correct… BUT, is photoshop displaying the prophoto profile, or is it converting to RGB for my viewing, or is my monitor converting it to rgb for my viewing? I guess I just don’t understand how the monitor fits into all of this. You HAVE to use your monitor to see your images, and since most monitors (including my current one are standard gamut) it would make sense that you actually can’t see anything in the prophoto profile, and you are truly looking at an srgb profile since that is all your monitor can display.
Oh ya, and what benefit is the color match rgb? It seems everyone speaks of the srgb, prophoto, and argb.. but never some of the others.. so maybe I am just lost. I would even appreciate a link to some tutorials if you think those would be helpful.
I am seriously confused.. I would really appreciate the help.

Answer 1

I am not surprised you are confused about colour management because its a confusing subject. Luckily you own a Mac so you can get to grips with what the problems that colour management solves using the "colorSync Utility" and you will find this in Applications >> Utilities >> colorSync Utility. If you own a windows computer then I am sorry but you will be out of luck here and you should know better when you buy your next computer!! I am not sure why Apple gave us this application but it is really useful and all will help you understand Color Management.
1. Launch Applications >> Utilities >> ColorSync Utility.
2. You will see a list of "Installed ColorSync Profiles". Choose Adobe RGB 1998 which I hope you have chosen in you camera preferences.
3.You will see a 3D representation of the Adobe 1998 Colour space. This represents all the colors this colour space will hold.
4. Top left hand corner you will see a little arrow pointing down next to "Lab Plot". Click on this and a drop down menu will appear.
    Choose "Hold For Comparison"
5. Now somewhere in the "Installed ColorSync Profiles" list you will find the profile for you monitor. Choose this.
6. You will now see a new colour space inside the Adobe 1998 Colour space. If you have a cheap monitor the colour space will be small
inside the Adobe 1998 profile. This means that you monitor cannot show you all the colors that are missing.
7. Now choose a printer profile say, if you use them a profile for an Epson paper or any printer profile you have and you will see another profile in the Adobe 1998 box which shows you the only colors that your printer can print. If you like choose your monitor profile then hold for comparison then the printer profile and it will clearly show the mis match between you monitor and printer.
8. Now choose SRGB and this will show you what colors a person using an average Windows monitor can see, poor people.
So this is the problem, all devises can reproduce only a certain range of colors. The adobe 1998 profile does not show all the colors our eyes can see " choose Generic Lab" profile, then "hold for comparison" then Adobe 1998 and you will see Adobe 1998 is a small profile but is a good average of our collective colour vision.
So how to solve all these missing colour problems. Well if you think of each devise, including you camera as speaking a different language from you monitor and printer then it is easy to understand that you need some sort of translator so that they all know exactly what colour is being talked bout pixel by pixel in an image. This is held in the ICC profile, but an ICC profile has o do more than this.
Say you camera can produce a specific red we will call for demo purposes "001" and your monitor cannot produce it, how do you solve this? Well it is very easy to fool our eyes. Our eyes work by comparison so if the profile maps red "001 to the nearest red that the monitor can show and then proportionally remaps all other reds to fit within the reds the monitor can show us then we actually think we are seeing a full range of reds. The problem comes if we use the wrong profile for this. The red 001 could be re mapped anywhere and could be outside what the monitor can show. Say that happens but the printer can reproduce that red 001. We would see an image on the monitor with not many reds and when we printed it we would be shocked to find reds on the print. Worst, we would see an image on the monitor without reds and would correct for this and end up with a print with heavy reds and would not be able to work out why.
So to solve this we should:
1. use the correct camera profile when we are opening "Raw" files.
2. Make sure you have the correct monitor ICC profile selected in "System Preferences" >> Displays.
3. In photoshop we should make sure that the " Edit >> colour settings " are set to Adobe 1998 for RGB.
4. If you are going to print you own photo in Photoshop go to "View >> Proof Setup >> Custom" and a box will
open. Choose the profile of your printer and paper and choose "Perceptual" for rendering intent and then " OK". If you cannot find
a profile for you printer and paper go to the printer of paper manufactures web site and download the profiles and instal
them.
5. You can now adjust the colors and contrast and photoshop will simulate how the output devise will deal with this. If you
are using an outside printing house, they will supply you with their ICC profile to download so just follow the same procedure and
choose their ICC profile and and do you colour correction.
If you have a cheap monitor you will still not get a 100% result but you will get closer. You really need a monitor that you can  calibrate
regularly because generic ICC profiles are just that. They are made from the results of many monitors and so are 90% or worse accurate.
If you want to see a flag ship monitor at work go to http://www.eizo.com/global/support/db/products/software/CG223W#tab02 and go
to the bottom of the page and download the Eizo Coloredge CG223W monitor profile, instal it on your mac then open then ope
Launch Applications >> Utilities >> ColorSync Utility choose Adobe 1998 the hold and compare it with the  Eizo Coloredge CG223W
profile. This is not the top of the range Eizo monitors that we use but you will see that this monitor will show most of the missing colour you monitor does not. This is actually a good tip if you are buying a monitor. Download the monitors profile and see how good it really is.
The weak link still is printing. The colors you see in RGB on a back lit RGB screen are very hard to reproduce by CYMK inks on paper. Here you really should have a profile made for your printer and chosen paper. If you don't want the expense of buying a calibrator and doing it yourself, there are on line services that will do this for you.
One final point you must remember. If you are using soft proofing in Photoshop ( "View >> Proof Setup >> Custom" as explained above), when you print you MUST choose in "Colour Handling" "Photoshop Manages Colour" and in the next step when the printing box appears
you will see a drop down box with "Layout" in it. Click on this and choose "Colour Management and choose "Off No Colour Management". If you do not do this Photoshop will manage the colour then the printer will do it again and the print will be a disaster.
This is a starting point really. Colour management is difficult but just try to remember that you need a translator between each step in the process to make it work so you have to make sure the correct profiles are being used by you camera, the program you use for opening the Raw photo files (Please don't use jpegs straight from the camera, but thats another subject), the correct monitor profile and output profile. If you don't check these it is like chinese whispers and your picture will be printed in Double Dutch!!.
Hope that helps. I am on location In Italy for a couple of months so will be unlikely to be able to reply to any questions for a while. Will try to check back and see how you are getting on. Drop me a line at [email protected] if you have any questions. Good luck.
Paul Williams