Rendering Intents for printing

[JohnT]

Let's talk RIs for a minute. :-) If you print your own pictures, what RI do you prefer? Although Relative Colorimetric is recommended in a lot of things that I read, I find that sometimes I get better color rendition with Absolute Colorimetric. With some Kodak paper that I recently bought, their instructions recommend Perceptual, but really doesn't look good. I guess it can depend on the paper and output profile as to which one looks best.

[Gordon]

I use relative colormetric or perceptual. I've never liked absolute or saturation, other than for business graphics.

I usually just soft proof first and use the one that gives me the colours I want.

The main problem is getting profiles that are accurate for your particular triple of paper/ink/printer. Switch to a different paper for example and all bets are off, or use a profile for a paper with a different ink set and again, its basically meaningless.

[billbunton]

Neither absolutely nor saturation tend to be a good choice for printing photographs. Relative colorimetric and perceptual are the two that work well for photographs, and it tends to be a personal call (and dependent on the photo) which works better.

I find that, in general, perceptual does a better job for me, at least ot the extent that it's the default I have set. I do tend to always check relative also, whenever I have an image that is out of gamut. (And of course, if it's not out of gamut the rendering intent doesn't matter :-)

[JohnT]

It sounds like I need to do more tweaking so that Relative gives me more acceptable results. It's probably something in another part of my workflow so I'll need to reexamine that to pinpoint the weakness.

[jeffkohn]

I most often use rel-col with BPC, it seems to give me the best results. I'll soft-proof in PS and check the gamut warning to see if the image exceeds the gamut of the printer profile. If it's signficantly out of gamut I'll either use selective edits to bring it back within gamut, or else soft-proof with Perceptual and see how that looks.

[JohnT]

I reprocessed a couple of images and printed them using Rel Col, and they came out really nice. Compared to the Abs Col ones, they definitely look better. Soft-proofing with Perceptual shifts the color to a slight greenish tint. Not sure why.

[Ric]

The rendering Intent is used to tell Adobe Color Management how to handel colors that are
out of gamut. If you view your saturated image - turn on the Gamut warning and you can see what is not going to print the way you see on screen.

Your Monitor is capable of showing you many more colors than your printers color space can produce.

Adjust your rendering intent to get the most out of your colors.


Ric