colour profiles

[angelman]

I am also trying to get my head around colour profiling. Since most scanning is done for print the colour profiling system seems geared towards this. However I am wanting to output back to film which has a much wider gamut than print, in fact the same as the source material. How does colour profiling fit into all this. I am a little confused.
I have images coming from digital camera 8bit jpeg and 12bit RAW, images from our nikon scanner 14/16bit TIF and also 12bit Cineon log images. The images are all displayed on the same brand of Sony monitor. What does colour profiling have to do with all this. Is it that if I use say ICC profiles it keeps all the images in the same colour space? Does the colour profile actually change the saved image or is it just for viewing??

Sorry for all the questions

[President_LSI]

Colour Spaces and ICC-Profiles

The purpose of colour mangement and ICC-Profiles is to create consistency between Input-, Internal-, Monitor- and Output colour spaces. The bit-depth itself is not relevant as long as there are no strong conversions in 8 bit colour space with the disadvantage of artifacts and banding.

ICC-Profiles describe the appropriate colour spaces and the colour mangement will process these descriptions accordingly so the conversion between these colour spaces, when for example, an input from a scanner is displayed on a monitor, the Scanner ICC-profile eliminates the deviations of the scanner colour space and passes the data on to the Silverfast internal colour space (e.g. Adobe RGB). The data is then passed on to the internal colour space of Photoshop (which has to be set to the same colour space) and from the internal colour space of Photoshop it is passed on to the Monitor (using the Monitor ICC-profile).
The monitor will then display the image correctly in its colour space.

All colour spaces have to communicate via the relevant ICC-profiles thus creating predictable and consistant colour, which before could only be achieved with high-end equipment and long education in colour reproduction.

Please also view the nice and educative tutorials on SilverFast ICC- and colour mangement settings of UK photographer Ian Lyons:

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/sf5_contents.htm

Also, relevant information on colour management:

http://www.digitaldog.net/tips.html



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: President_LSI on 2002-04-26 10:12 ]</font>