Start of geekspeak week

There are six of us in John Paul Caponigro’s farmhouse/studio, several miles deep in the Maine countryside. It’s that workshop mode of a temporary bond being formed, and John is good at being the midwife. He makes sure we all get equal attention on the intros, and stresses the importance of good wine and food at night, away from the computers, in the coming week. The sex ratio is almost balanced, surprisingly: two women with lush Louisiana accents, a man with a Virginia drawl, two New Englanders and me. Two of us are pros.

I have permission to share what I’m learning. Here is today’s tip. Civilians may stop here.

The real way to soft proof: Set up your image and a duplicate, side by side. Turn on soft proofing (Ctrl-Y) for one. The gamut warning setting? It’s worse than useless. A better way? On the soft-proofed image, open up a hue-sat box. Slide the saturation slider to the right. The colors that don’t change are the ones that are out of gamut. What do you do about them? Not much. Count on your rendering intent (perceptual or relative colormetric, see which one looks better) to bring them into line. The shifts that you see on your soft-proofed version? Make it look like the original one with a combination of saturation changes (first globally, then on individual colors), then by a contrast curve. Everything is contingent on how the print proof looks, but this will get you 80% of the way there.

Comments

[Jeff Carlson]

My gosh, I think I understood all of that. My brain has exploded!

Have a great workshop.

[Karl Zipser]

Doug,

A workshop like this sounds fantastic. But I don't understand this exactly:

"The sex ratio is almost balanced, surprisingly: two women with lush Louisiana accents, a man with a Virginia drawl, two New Englanders and me. Two of us are pros."

Anyway, it sounds like fun. I hope you will share more of the secrets about photography.

[Doug Plummer]

Karl,

I am accustomed to workshops of this type being 90% male. The analog is the workshops my wife teaches, on psychotherapy techniques, that are 90% female. Six people is not a very big data set though, and two women can skew it to near parity. I guess it wasn't clear that the remainder were male.