Color Management, I'm doing it wrong?

[Ysarex83 77]

Thanks guys. The folks at adoramapix recommended that I embed color profile on my abstract landscape stuff in sRGB, and I'm really just to handle this as intelligently as the average bear. I'm on a laptop though I may just be kidding myself here. I do try to pseudocalibrate before playing with my pics (adjust the angle and check black point and for banding).

I don't know. This studying could also be similar to when I told Mr. Squirrels that I wasn't sure I believed in the fourier transform. I'll never get those hours of my life back.

I may not understand playing in a bigger colorspace is going to help if I'll be forced to dumbing it down to sRGB for printing, but I'm willing to do that without entirely understanding why. Perhaps if one day I might want to use a printer that can handle a bigger colorspace?

As Mike noted and you've verified, you're on a laptop that is not calibrated or profiled. Until you get off the laptop and get a hardware calibrator you've basically got a three legged table with one missing leg.

In Raw Therapee you want to set the working profile to ProPhoto. This will allow RT the greatest amount of headroom in converting your raw file to RGB. Then set the Output profile to sRGB. RT will convert from ProPhoto to sRGB when you process out to a TIFF or JPEG.

In RT preferences there's a tab for Color Management. Set the intent to Perceptual and make sure RT has the directory location for your ICC profiles: Windows -- Color, MAC -- Profiles. The last item in that list is going to hang you up right now since you can't identify a Monitor profile. Eventually you'll want to be able to do that.

In GIMP I suggest you do not set the Mode of Operation to Print Simulation. Set it instead to Color Managed Display. You don't want to edit all of your photos to a fixed printer/paper target. Your photo editing should be more generic.

In GIMP set the RGB profile to sRGB, CMYK to none and again you'll need to get your display profiled so that you can set the Monitor profile. Check the little box that says Try to use the System Profile. Rendering intent is Perceptual and then you set the Print Simulation Profile: Adoramapix......

To view the Print Simulation in GIMP from the View menu select Display Filters. Make sure you have Color Proof as an active filter. Select Color Proof and set your Adoramapix.... profile, Perceptual intent, and check black point on. You can then activate Color proofing as needed to soft proof for the print profile and switch it back off to edit your photos to the more appropriately generic Color Manged Display mode. Again I would caution you not to edit your photos to any specific printer/paper combination.

Joe