Color management between different pieces of software

Question

I don't know much about color management even though I read a lot about it today. I know a computer needs calibration in order to render colors accurately, but as an amateur, I don't have the tools or the budget for that. And I'm not sure it would solve my problem anyway.

All I need is, within my screen and its color inaccuracies that I'm well aware of, to be sure that the colors are ate least visually in sync between softwares so that I can trust the internal colors when I work. It's ok at this point if those colors are not necessarily correct out of the box (printing), as long as they are consistent inside the box (editing).

So here is my actual problem:

I try to reproduce, in photoshop and Illustrator, some illustrations that I have in a PDF file. But the same PDF file renders differently within Acrobat DC, iMac Preview and Photoshop. I don't know which one to trust.

I would tend to believe Acrobat is the one to trust because PDF's are native but the result is very vivid for a file that was made to be printed (it seems very "RGB"). The iMac preview software however seems strangely the most "accurate" (it does look like the physical prints I have of the same illustrations).

Left = iMac Preview software, right = Acrobat DC

As you can see, the rendering discrepancies from the same reference PDF file I use are huge. So, I don't know which one to trust. The left one is so close to the actual physical cards bit it's just a preview. The right one is less faithful to the real thing but it is native Acrobat PDF. I think I should logically stick with Acrobat DC but my eyes keep telling me otherwise.

Here are my settings( I'm in Central Europe):

I set the color workspace as CMYK within Photoshop and Illustrator because, I would like to print the result when finished (I'm not there yet so that's not the point right now).

iMac colorsync:

• profile : sRGB IEC61966-2.1

Photoshop Edit/Colors:

• RVB : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
• CMYK: Coated Fogra39
• Grayscale : Dot Grain 15%
• Direct tone: Dot Grain 15%
• Color management: Keep the incorporated profile

Illustrator Edit/Colors:

• RVB : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
• CMYK: Coated Fogra39
• Color management: Keep the incorporated profile

Acrobat DC Preferences/Color management:

• Options: Pre-press for Europe 3
• RVB : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
• CMYK: Coated Fogra39
• Grayscale : Dot Grain 15%

The iMac preview software however doesn't want to let me set up anything when I use a PDF. The proof options are greyed out when previewing a PDF.

So, Is there anything (else) I should do (or something I do wrong) in terms of basic settings ? Any advise that is realistic in my case (buying a tool or hiring a pro to calibrate my computer for a few hundred of euros just for editing a few files as an amateur is overkill).

I totally get that my screen will not render the same way as my printer or as any other screen. But I don't get why, within the same screen different pieces of picture dedicated software would render colors so differently when set up the same way. I really tried to understand but it's beyond me. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Garbage in → Garbage out! This is exactly what a uncalibrated system should produce. Inconsistent results. But also note your not telling me the most important part, what is your conversion intent.

Anyway the purpose of color management is to simulate a result. Explicitly it is not geared to make same colors same on all system applications. Indeed it is because of this purpose that they are different! But offcourse a simulation thats done wrong is wrong.

Your screengrabs dont also help because i have no way of knowing what you see. But those differences indeed tell you how much the color can easily vary between two uncalibrated systems.

Simply your software use different color engines that have been calibrated differently. Also we know nothing of how your print service is tuned. Indeed many cheap systems act like rgb systems no point in making cmyk on devices that dont act like cmyk devices.

Think about a similar situation. Lets compare a cheap home piano and a grand concert piano. Which do you assume sounds correct? Which is more likely to be recently tuned? Which needs more tuning? Which has more options when it comes to tuning? Which will when not treated properly work good?

PS: also it is very unlikely that a system would be tuned so that every application is correct. Since many apps are just way too buggy to do that even though both mac and widows is color managed. You would only tune and trust a part of your system. I would not expect all apps to display same even on a perfectly calibrated system especially for CMYK data.

Answer 2

This is an approximate guesstimate method of trying to calibrate your workflow. It is not the way the professionals do it & there is much more margin for error...

For home printing you can entirely ignore CMYK, unless your existing images are already in CMYK, in which case you've a bit more approximation to do at the end. Home printers don't use CMYK, they convert internally from RGB, using your printer profile & screen profile, both managed outside of Photoshop.

To see what the image should look like, then you need an accurate colour calibration of your screen. Without that everything, absolutely everything you do is guesswork.

You can have a go at manually calibrating your screen on a Mac by opening Syetem Prefs > Displays > Colour, then hold Opt & Click Calibrate…
In the new screen that opens, make sure the Expert mode is on, then work through each section until you reach the point you can save your new profile.
Because it's a bit hit & miss doing this manually, I'd suggest you do it 3 or 4 times, each time saving a new profile name. At the end, go back to the initial Displays pref & click between them. If you get two or three that look very similar to each other, pick one of those as your profile. Discard the rest. This eliminates some, but not all, of the human error you will encounter trying to perform this task by eye.

Once you have your Display profile established, you can then ignore it. The Mac will look after it for you.

Go to Photoshop & in the Colour Settings prefs Cmd ⌘ Shift ⇧ K set your Working space to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (you can ignore the others for now.) In Colour Management below, set all three to Preserve Embedded Profiles. Set Mismatches & Missing profiles to Ask.
Everything else should default as follows:-

The logic behind Asking at mismatch or missing is it's a quick way to discover what profile your existing documents have. As soon as you open one, if it's not already sRGB Photoshop will ask you. Tell it to preserve anyway, but you'll at least have a known quantity.

If the images are in any kind of RGB, then preserving that until the end is 'safer' in some respects. I very much doubt they would be in P3, ProRes or even Adobe RGB which can cause issues of perception vs accuracy in an unregulated workflow (but not enough to worry you unless you do this for a living).

If they start in CMYK, then you might have to take a punt. See what it looks like unconverted vs converted to sRGB.
This is going to have to be an artistic decision, because you can't accurately compare between them & CMYK is no use to your home printer.
It would probably be worthwhile printing one as as further test of this rather guesswork part of your process to decide what's best for your overall workflow.

I'd then recommend, from CMYK probably to convert to sRGB (after your tests), from any RGB work in the existing profile. Again, try a test print.

If any of this is as confusing as all heck… welcome to colour management workflows ;)
Professionals have expensive hardware devices to measure all this. Home users have to do a lot of guessing & testing.