Is converting to a printer ICC profile a valid way to handle out-of-gamut colors?

Question

When soft-proofing images for print in Photoshop, I’m seeing some saturated colors go out of gamut. Trying to reduce those colors manually in Camera Raw or with curves affects too much of the image and doesn’t give good results.

Instead, I tried converting a copy of the image to the print lab’s ICC profile using Edit > Convert to Profile. This seems to pull the out-of-gamut colors back into range, and the gamut warning disappears without damaging the rest of the image.

Is this a correct and reliable workflow for print preparation? Also, how do rendering intents affect this — especially perceptual vs relative colorimetric — when converting to the printer profile?

user40427 · Accepted Answer

This is how color management is designed to work. When converting out-of-gamut colors into a new color space, both the Perceptual and Relative rendering intents put those out-of gamut colors at the outer-most edge of the target space's gamut.

Relative intent only affects those out-of-gamut colors, while Perceptual compresses the image's entire color palette until all out-of-gamut colors fit in the target space's gamut.

You will indeed get back from the print shop what you see on screen with this technique (at least as close as color management can get to matching monitor colors to printed colors, provided their printer and your monitor are properly calibrated and profiled, obviously).

Is converting to a printer ICC profile a valid way to handle out-of-gamut colors?

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