STOP trying to 'Fix' Gamut Warning! Do THIS instead in Photoshop.

so instagram has 95 million photos uploaded daily but you know what they say if it's not printed it doesn't count and if you struggle to make your prints look anywhere close to how good it looks on your screen then this video is for you [Applause] hey welcome back this is it now before we begin it is very important you watch the color spaces video which explains all the important basics in details this video simply picks up from where that left off now print work involves the cmyk color space and that is where gamut comes into play when we're talking about printing a gamut is the range of colors that a printer can print and a printer which uses the cmyk color space has a much smaller color camera than our monitors which use the rgb color space now if you're thinking i have an rgb color printer so i don't need this that is not the case unlike popular belief even an injured printer which accepts an rgb image its printer driver rips the rgb color profile internally into its own flavor of cmyk don't believe me check your rgb printer and you will find the cyan magenta yellow and black ink cartridges now the common colors present in both the color gamuts of your display and the printer are known as the in-gamut colors and they will print exactly the way you see it on your screen and the out of gamut colors are the one that can only be displayed on the screen but are unprintable now let me clarify out of gamut doesn't mean you cannot print the colors at all the hue of the color is not the problem what the printer can't produce is the high saturation and the lightness of that color so a bright lime green color won't be printed as blue or yellow it will be printed as a green but the shade and tint of that green will be different and this is because we are viewing on a backlit monitor projecting bright light at us and if you remember from the color theory video rgb is an additive color space that is they add red green and blue lights to mix and make brighter colors cmyk is exactly opposite and is subtractive that is they subtract light by reflecting from the white paper by mixing cyan magenta and yellow ink pigments to make darker colors so cmyk prints won't have that bright saturated colors that you would be expecting because trying to print rgb colors is like attempting to print light itself which i'm pretty sure none of the printers do they all use ink cartridges right now let me show you how to identify and fix these out of gamut colors in photoshop in photoshop when you double click on the color to open the color pickup panel you can sometimes see a warning symbol this symbol signifies that the color you currently have selected is out of gamut for printing and there is a small colored box right next to this warning symbol if you click inside this box the color panel will automatically switch to the nearest neighboring color that is within the cmyk gamut and it is usually the highly saturated brighter colors that will be out of gamut now to check if a color is out of gamut navigate to the top menu bar and click view and then gamut warning take a look this greyed out chunk is the bright saturation that is out of gamut or unprintable and as i slide the hue you can see the preview of printable colors in cmyk and if i use the shortcut ctrl or command shift plus y i can turn on the gamut warning on or off and over time you will identify these out of gamut colors just by seeing it now if you've seen the color theory video you know very well that the red green and blue color is opposite of cyan magenta and yellow in the modern color wheel even their values are opposite look at the amount of ink required in sian magenta yellow and black to produce the brightest rgb color all of them have zero percentage of ink and this is another practical reason why we can't print the brightest rgb color and on a side note sometimes you see this cube which represents that the colors are not web safe these web safe colors have nothing to do with our cmyk color gamut they are the same rgb colors and can display high saturation the thing is all the displays were limited by bit depth which controls the smoothness of the color transition to display a smooth color image a monitor has to have a minimum of 8 bits per channel that is 8 multiplied by the 3 rgb channels that is 24 bits total and on older 8 or 16 bit monitor a 24-bit image is simplified into what looks like pointillism art and that's why we had web safe colors to see which colors are easily displayed on those monitors anyway you can learn everything about bit depth in digital images from this video above now it is very important to know that out of gamut warning that we see is based on the cmyk profile that we set in the proof setup and the warning overlay that we were seeing is based on the default cmyk profile but if you have a specific printer profile you will need to assign that profile to make sure that the print matches your display and to do this we have to go to the view menu proof setup and custom and here in the device you need to select the specific color profile of the printer when you work with a magazine or a pro lab that you send your prints to they usually have their custom icc profile sent over which has been specifically measured for their particular printer ink and paper settings so you can access that from here and if you don't have any specific printer's color profile you can choose the default working cmyk profile which will also give you a good enough idea of how the colors will change in print now that we understand out of gamut colors let me show you how to take control over it in your image and i'm going to show you two different techniques so assuming that this file is ready to be printed the first thing that you should do is go to view and then proof colors so with this soft proofing feature photoshop can simulate on your monitor what your image will look like after it's printed and you can toggle the soft proof view using the shortcut control or command y at this point you must be wondering how can a monitor simulate the output of a printer if they have different color gamuts fortunately the reason soft proofing is even possible is because most rgb monitors have a wider color gamut than cmyk prints and this is where it helps to have a color calibrated white gamut adobe rgb monitors even the regular p3 display color space on apple devices is capable of showing almost all the cmyk colors and for best results work in a larger color space like profoto rgb or adobe rgb so with a soft proof colors option on photoshop will remap and convert the out-of-gamut colors to the printer's color profile and this is based on the rendering intent setting which brings us to the next step to set the render intent settings again let's go to the view proof setup and custom options here we've already set the printer's target profile which in our case is the default cmyk now if the printer profile has colors missing from its gamut photoshop handles it based on one of these intent options that we set if you remember i've explained all of these options in the converting color profiles video which by the way is different from the color spaces video and all these links will be down in the description below so the common ones for photography is either the relative colorimetric or perceptual so what is the difference between them when we set to relative coloring metric photoshop simply replaces all out of gamut colors with the nearest color in the printer gamut it doesn't affect the printable colors in the gamut though perceptual on the other hand changes colors by altering the saturation of the entire image proportionally in a balanced way so that the colors lie within the printer's gamut an absolute colorimetric is very similar to relative coloring metric it preserves the in-gamut colors and clips those out of gamut but absolute colorimetric also preserves the white point which causes the colour shifts and saturation rendering intent tries to preserve the saturated colours at the expense of changes in hue and the lightness of the colour so which should you use and when i personally find relative coloring metric to work better with landscapes and environmental portraits while perceptual looks better for skin tones in beauty and portraits but the only way to decide is using the soft proof feature and preview both these options and remember you will only notice a difference if there are a lot of out of gamut colors in your image so if you don't notice any difference now you know why and the black point compensation here will visually adjust the differences in the black points between the color spaces i usually keep it checked on and paper color simulates the chosen profile paper's particular shade of white i usually turn it on in the end to check the contrast and if you use either of these two settings make sure to view in full screen mode without any distractions now sometimes you want to take control over this process and not rely completely over photoshop's intent options for that we need to first identify the out-of-comment areas in your image now this is important keep in mind that soft proofing can not show you where the outer gamut colours are clipping it just shows you the preview after converting the out of gamut colors so to see where the out of gamut colors are clipping let's go to the view menu and turn on gamut warning and watch what happens to your image is the same grayed out areas that we saw in the color picker and don't worry the gray color won't print the solid gray color is just a mass overlapped preview of the areas that have out of gamut colors for the chosen cmyk profile now many photoshop users have been taught that they must do something to bring these colors into gamut making the gray overlay disappear completely this is a big misunderstanding these colors have already been bought into gamut by the rendering intent that we set so if you turn off gamut warning while view proof colors is on and examine the colors underneath you're already seeing the colors that will be printed even if you do nothing and the reason for this confusion is partly because out of gamut warning predates the nearest soft proofing technology and they don't really communicate with each other because even when the out of gamut colors are already converted by photoshop's rendering intent and soft proof view the gamut warning mask is still based on the unconverted colours which is misleading so the thing is you should only do something about the gamut warning if you think you can do a better job than what the rendering intent has already done and if not done right the changes you make may eliminate the warnings but make the result worse than if you had done nothing and this is because you're making corrections based on a gamut overlay that doesn't use transparency and seems to hide even the partially out of gamut colors completely now that being said there is a workaround to show you the intensity of the colors that are out of gamut instead of showing a flat solid gray so let's go to preferences and select transparency and gamut and now you can set the opacity to somewhere around 70 to 80 percent here you can also change the color of the gray overlay to something like green because red is usually taken for the quick mask mode so how do we use the gamut warning to fix the out of gamut colors like i said earlier when you're viewing the soft proof in the destination color profile and you want to fine tune further to what the rendering intent has already done then you can turn on the gamut warning to see where those colors are altered now i'm going to show you two different methods to fine tune your outer gamut colors let's start with this landscape and make sure all the soft proof and gamut warnings are off so the colors i've chosen are obviously bright and saturated and any experienced photographer can tell you straight away that these bright colors will shift in printing but now with the soft proofing feature we can see for ourselves so let's view our cmyk soft proof by pressing ctrl or command y and photoshop will show us the preview based on the rendering intent that we set in proof setup which in this case was the relative coloring metric because it looks slightly better than perceptual and you can tell from the top here that we are viewing the cmyk proof and this image has lost the saturation and the separation between the sky and c has vanished so for this image i'll start by creating a hue saturation adjustment layer and then double click the mask to go to masking properties and then choose color range now take a look at this when you go all the way to the end of the sample color menu you also have something called out of gamut selecting this will create a mask with just the out of gamut area selected so now whatever adjustments we make won't affect the in-gamut colors and the idea here is to remove the gamut overlay in this step like we would do before the soft proofing days the way we want to use it is targeted color but i won't go into the specific colors manually i'll use this hand slider also known as the targeted adjustment tool which is faster and visually interactive so as soon as i click on a particular color it will be targeted and you can see the color is now set to san instead of master so if i click and drag left it reduces the saturation just like it shows on the saturation slider now if you want to change the hue this way all you need to do is hold ctrl or command and then slide the targeted hand tool to change the hue but you should change the hue of the color only when necessary to fit the colors into gamma and use it very slightly so you can press the alt or option key along with the ctrl command and then drag the slider this makes the slider move very slowly and be more precise and below in these color bars we can see the range of sand color selected for a smoother transition i'll drag these outside triangle sliders away from its vertical bar but this will expand the selected color range as well so you need to see the preview and find the best balance now i'm going to click on the reds to reduce the saturation and notice in the color bar the reds are split into half so for easier access i can hold the ctrl or command to get the hand cursor and then simply drag the color bar to reposition it so now i can see the entire range of red color and play with the transition sliders so on a side note this color bar is a one dimensional view of a color wheel notice that the range sliders of the hues are labeled in degrees it's because the value corresponds to their location on the color wheel circumference anyway the color theory video explains it all so now that we got rid of the camera warning i'm going to make sure that the gamut warning is turned off next i'll click on the mask and feather it to about 10 pixels to remove any artifacts if any because this was a crude out of gamut mask now remember that the layer below is already displaying the colors after remapping them into a print gamut and all these corrections we made are based on the gamut warning of the original rgb color space but we are still in our soft proof view mode which you can see here is cmyk so we can safely reduce the opacity to find the perfect blend between the photoshop rendering intent conversion below which had good color saturation with a manual correction based on the gamut warning which has a better luminosity so at around 60 opacity i'm getting the perfect print colors now let's move on to this image which most consider a nightmare because of these hard to print blue and magenta colors and if you check the out of gamut warning for this image you can see that everything is out of gamut so if you have an image like this let me saturate your expectations in advance the thing is you will have to sacrifice the saturation to get something halfway close to the rgb colors on display these images look great on the internet but making it print ready for a magazine is completely another story so let me show you how i do it for such images i won't even bother using the gamut warning mask like in the previous technique i'll start by duplicating the image and arranging them side by side for visual reference next i'll go to the proof setup and see which rendering intent works best for this image basically i'm looking for a good starting point so it seems like absolute colorimetric looks the best here and why not because this is an extreme image now i'll use the original image as reference and using curves adjustment i'll fix the soft proofed image to match the contrast and colors as much as possible and because of these colors it will require some playing around if you haven't already watch the curves video to see how to fully use it next i'll use the hue saturation to target the blues and take creative liberty to play around with the hue and also the saturation and this is mainly to see which shade of blue is printable and still retains the color contrast and also in the sand i'll tweak the hue and saturation of it so this looks the best you can do with the hue saturation and to fine tune this i'll create a vibrance adjustment to boost the vibrance a bit so there this looks as close as we can print it and when you see the print version without distraction it looks colorful and contrasty so i'll press f twice to view in the full screen mode and this is the best we could do with the cmyk limitations and if you press f back again you go back to your normal view and this is what would have printed if we let photoshop's rendering intent handle it and using this technique you can control to some extent how your conversion will look now if this was part of a series of images you can group and save the adjustment and call it something like cmyk fix and as long as you haven't done any custom masking on these layers they can be reused on other images that are being sent to the same printing device all you need to do is simply drag and drop this group into the new image now it is very important that you understand that we are only previewing the final colors using soft roofing which temporarily assigns the profile we chose in the proof setup keep in mind that the original file color space is still an rgb so we will have to actually convert the profile before printing and i'll be doing the conversion on this duplicate file because i want my original file to stay as rgb so with the duplicate copy selected i'll go to edit and then convert to profile and not assign profile i've explained assign profile versus convert to profile in the color profiles video so make sure you check that out if you have even the slightest confusion so in convert to profile i'll choose the same destination profile we based our proof setup on and convert it using the same rendering intent which for this image was absolute colorimetric so click ok and then you can save it and before you send it off to the printer make sure you have resized with proper resolution settings like i've explained in this video and sharpened it creatively for that particular size as shown in this video again all these links will be below in the description so next time you print try out these techniques to see if you get better results and if you learned anything new today consider liking subscribing and ring that notification bell to be notified of new videos as and when they release until then thank you for watching you

Channel: StyleMyPic

Views: 22,188

Keywords: Gamut Warning, Soft Proof in Photoshop, Assign Profile, Convert to Profile, Print Management, Color Management, Photoshop Tutorial

Id: 8ZXXpomtODc

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020