Can you prepare wide-gamut prints with a standard laptop display?
Asked 5/14/2014
4 views
2 answers
0
I shoot RAW and would like to make prints with a wider gamut than my laptop screen can display. My laptop only shows about 60% of sRGB, so it covers even less of Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. How can I build a sensible workflow for printing to a wider-gamut printer when I can’t fully see those colors on screen? Also, do consumer labs offer this, or is wide-gamut printing only realistic if you own an expensive monitor and printer?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
8
First, one need not spend $10,000 on a printer to get a wide gamut. To be specific, to PRINT wide gamut, you don't need to spend a lot of money. There is often an implicit association between managing color and printing wide gamut, however the two are actually separate activities. These days, the actual process of managing color is automated by ICM, which reduces the complexity of color management to choosing the right ICC profile for your printer and paper, and just printing. That will usually get you great results most of the time. So right now, I am assuming that, based on the wording used in your question, you are simply looking for the ability to print on a wide gamut printer, and not looking for a dissertation on the nuances of color management (which encompasses a lot more than just printing.)
The sub-$1000 Canon PIXMA Pro series and a couple Epson printers are all capable of printing wide gamut on a variety of papers with high quality pigment inks. Usually, a $10,000 printer gets you extra commercial-ready features, like ultra large format, roll printing, built-in hard drives to store queues prints, built-in color calibration features, monster ink tanks that can survive printing a single 60x40" print, etc.
Printing at a wide gamut is more about making sure your tones and colors are within the gamut of the printer, for the given type of paper, than anything. For that, you do not absolutely require a high gamut screen. You could, technically, get away with just Photoshop.
When it comes to printing, there is actually nothing that will stop you from printing a wide gamut print if you don't have a wide gamut screen. The printer will print what it's told to print. The difference is that you will have trouble judging the accuracy of the print if you have no accurate source of reference (i.e. a wide gamut calibrated screen) to compare it with.
The key thing about preparing an image for print on any printer is making sure the colors will fit within the gamut of the print. That means, for the given set of printer, ink and paper...do the colors of your print fall in or out of gamut. Photoshop, and even now Lightroom v4 and up, offer soft proofing. You can soft proof your photos, which will give you a simulation of how the image will look when printed, with the option of simulating black point and paper color tinting. For these particular features to be valuable, you still need a wide gamut calibrated screen...if your laptop can only cover 60% of sRGB, that's going to be tough.
Another feature that Photoshop offers is the gamut warning. With this, even on a non-calibrated and otherwise ineffective screen, you can at least see how much of your print may result in a gamut error, which either requires manual tuning to bring that region of your print back within gamut, or the use of a scaling ICM rendering intent. Relative Colorimetric will scale in a methematically pure manner, while Perceptual will scale in a manner that generally maintains how human vision perceives the photo. Using either of these rendering intents is usually sufficient to get a good looking, generally color accurate print. If for whatever reason these do not suffice, there are a number of techniques you can use to manually bring out-of-gamut colors back into gamut (usually with masking techniques and some desaturation of a hue-restricted color range), tweak black and white points, etc. (The details here are probably best left for other, more targeted questions.)
For the most part, when you print, so long as you are using a quality printer, with quality papers and a proper ICC profile, you really don't have to worry. Tell Photoshop or Lightroom to print, and it'll happen. Most of the time, your prints will come out extremely well. If you don't already have a hypercritical eye for the minor kinds of defects that an extra $9000 is going to help you fix, then you don't need all that other fancy crap anyway. You'll be satisfied with your prints. You will have to use direct judgement to determine if the color looks right, you won't have anything to compare to with a screen that only covers 60% of sRGB. A number of other print tests, such as for metamerism and gloss differential, are performed directly in various kinds of lighting and at certain angles to the light anyway, so a calibrated wide gamut screen is unnecessary.
So long as you don't expect 99% accurate color reproduction, which is really going to require a nice high end, high quality wide gamut screen such as the NEC PA272W, or an even higher end LaCie or Eizo, for best results, there is nothing that will actually PREVENT you from printing wide gamut prints on a $1000 to $1500 pigment-ink printer. For that matter, the NEC PA272W is only $1200, so you don't even need to spend two grand on a monitor. You could probably get away with spending $2000 in total on both a screen and a printer, and then you really wouldn't have anything to worry about at all. The printers only really need to get more expensive if you really need to print on papers larger than 13x19"...a 17x20" printer is probably going to start at around $1500 or so, and for anything larger than that your definitely looking at over $2000 just for the printer.
Originally by user124. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user124
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes. Wide-gamut printing is possible without owning a very expensive printer, but accurate results depend on color management.
A practical workflow is:
- Edit from the RAW file and keep your master in a large color space such as ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB, ideally in 16-bit.
- Calibrate and profile your display with a hardware calibrator. Even if your screen can’t show the full print gamut, calibration helps you see accurate color within its limits.
- Use the correct ICC profile for the target printer/paper or lab. Modern color management makes this much easier than it used to be.
- Soft-proof if your software supports it, understanding that some printable colors may still be outside what your display can show.
You do not need a $10,000 printer to print a wide gamut, and you don’t necessarily need to own the printer at all. A capable lab using proper printer/paper profiles can produce wide-gamut prints for individuals.
The limitation is that with a narrow-gamut laptop display, you’ll be partly “blind” to some colors that will print. A wider-gamut monitor improves confidence, but it is not strictly required to produce good prints.
Recommended products
UniqueBot
AI12y ago
Your Answer
Related Questions
Can a laptop with limited screen gamut drive a full-gamut external monitor for photo editing?
What color space does Lightroom use outside Develop, and why does an sRGB export match the display best?
Is there a ProPhoto or wide-gamut printer test image for evaluating print profiles?
Why do sRGB and ProPhoto versions look different in Photoshop but the same in a browser?
Why do exported JPEGs look correct only in sRGB, but shift in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB?