Troubleshooting

Many things can go wrong when juggling profiles. Here's some trouble I've shot personally.

"I shot my pictures in Adobe RGB/sRGB, but Photoshop says there's no profile associated with the picture. What gives?"

This is some stupid and obscure issue related to the EXIF-JPEG standard: apparently, camera manufacturers aren't allowed to tag an image with a color space and be compliant with the standard. The solution is simple: just assign the color space you used to shoot it to the picture, and everything will be A-OK.

"My picture looks OK on-screen, but the color goes totally west on prints."

There are two likely causes for this: either you don't have the right profile associated with your printer, or you're applying it twice. Note that different papers and inks need different profiles. See the guide above for more on associating profiles with printers. So, first look on the CD that came with your printer or the printer or paper manufacturer's website, and try to find an ICC profile for the printer and paper/ink you're using. Do a web search if that fails to turn up anything.

However, if you already have the profile you want and you've set it as default, the problem is probably that it's getting applied twice. If you're using Photoshop or another color managed application to print your pictures, make sure that you haven't set the profile both at the application and at the printer driver: one of them must be set to "do not color manage." If you can color manage at the application, it's probably better not to color manage at the driver.

"I can't get my scans to match my transparencies, and white balancing the scans is a royal pain in the proverbial."

Uh-oh, sounds like your scanner needs profiling. I put off getting a target and doing this for way too long. If you find yourself struggling with getting your scans to match your trans, get an IT8 target and profile your scanner now. See the information at Hamrick Software for one way to do this.

"OK, I've calibrated my scanner and my film. My scans still don't match my trans. What gives?"

You're probably applying the profile twice. If your IT8 target was on Provia 100F and you calibrated your scanner on that, the scanner will be calibrated for Provia 100F. If you apply a Provia 100F profile a second time, as a film profile, the color will go nuts again. You only need to calibrate for specific films if you're using different ones -- and, IMO, if your original target was more or less neutral, like Provia, other transparencies will look more or less like they should. So, either use the profile you created as your scanner profile or your film profile, but not both.

Incidentally, you'll save yourself a lot of grief if you decide which two or three color films you're going to use, and learn what it takes to get good color out of them.

"Most of my pictures print out fine, but I've got a couple that look like they've got carrot juice (or some other vegetable juice) poured all over them, especially one of a nice sandstone structure at dusk."

First thing: check your monitor profile. Miscalibrations are most apparent in the extremes. It might look fine on your screen, but that don't mean it ain't totally wrong.

However, it can still happen even if everything is profiled just peachily. This means that the colorspace conversion between your image's colorspace and the printer's colorspace has gone wrong. Colorspace conversions are rarely neat one-to-one affairs; instead, the color values can get shunted around a good deal. That's why there are different "intents" for colorspace conversions. Most of the time "Perceptual" is the one to use -- but, being a best guess, sometimes it guesses wrong, especially if the picture has a uniform, subtle color to it; reds, yellows, and oranges are particularly sensitive. If printing from a colorspace-aware application, try setting some other intent -- Relative Colorimetric or Absolute Colorimetric just might save the day. The second thing to try is converting your image to a narrower gamut: for example, from Adobe RGB to sRGB, and then printing from that.

I went nuts trying to print this image: whatever I did, it wanted to come out orange. It turned out to be a combination of two problems: recalibrating my monitor and using Absolute Colorimetric got the result I had in mind.

If all else fails, you can muck around with the transfer curve, or the image itself. Whatever you do, don't mess with your printer profile if it works well almost all the time -- if you fix it for these few pictures, chances are that you'll break it for everything else.

"I'm using CaptureOne DSLR, and the preview doesn't match the developed images, or the JPEG's I extracted from my RAW files."

Any chance that if you click on the Soft Proofing button, your pictures and thumbnails will turn into a mixture of hot pink, cyan, and orange? Just curious. Anyway, this happened to me, and the culprit was my monitor profile -- C1 didn't like it. I profiled my monitor as described above, and the problem went away. Note that you will have to click the Soft Proofing button to see what the output will look like -- un-click it, and you'll see... something else. There's a reason C1 starts up with soft proofing on, and the reason is that it should stay that way, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

"My pictures always look too dark or too light or the wrong color on-screen, but they print fine."

Check that you're using the factory profile for your monitor (see the second-to-last item in the profiling guide). If you are, profile your monitor as described in the guide.