{"id":295,"date":"2020-09-23T13:43:41","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T12:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theprintspace.co.uk\/help\/?post_type=ht_kb&p=295"},"modified":"2025-09-04T17:02:44","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T16:02:44","slug":"manual-colour-profile-conversion","status":"publish","type":"ht_kb","link":"https:\/\/www.theprintspace.co.uk\/help\/knowledge-base\/manual-colour-profile-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"Manual colour profile conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Understanding the printer’s gamut and how to best display your artwork ready for print.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does “Gamut” mean?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Some intense colour information that is easily captured by your digital camera and displayed by your monitor will not be able to be reproduced on the printer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colours in the digital file that can’t be reproduced by the printer are referred to as outside the printer’s “gamut”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our standard Adobe 1998 RGB profile gamuts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Image 1<\/strong> in the visual example below shows the gamuts of our standard RGB profile, Adobe 1998, and digital C-Type on Fuji Crystal Archive Matt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can see that Adobe 1998 is larger and holds tones that lie outside of the capabilities of the printer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we said in our video above about soft proofing, to see what our print will look like we must convert from Adobe 1998 to the print profile, but this conversion will mean removing colours which can’t be printed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is done automatically using a conversion engine, either Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual, but for maximum control it can be done manually and this video will demonstrate how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Visual Example<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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For example, if you wanted to print Image 2<\/strong> using digital C-Type Fuji Crystal Archive Matt, you would select theprintspace Fuji Matt profile in Photoshop’s view soft proof tool and click OK. Now in the same view menu select Gamut Warning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image 3<\/strong> shows the areas in the image that are not reproducible in print are highlighted in green, which establishes the problem colours which can’t be printed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned above, a conversion engine can be used to reduce the intensity of the out of gamut colours to bring them back into gamut, but we are going to use a different more manual approach is taken which requires subjective evaluation and editing techniques to pull the problematic tones back within the capabilities of the printer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Method 1: Adding Cyan<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One quick method is to add cyan to a specific colour to “dull” it down. So back to the example the oranges can be edited in selective colour by going to reds and adding cyan to the red. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notice how the cyan dulls the orange down reducing the amount of green flagged by the gamut warning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Method 2: Using Channels<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A second more complex technique involves the close inspection of the channel information in the image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Layers <\/strong>palette, go to the channels and subjectively evaluate the channel holding the most information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In our example the Green<\/strong> channel holds a lot of detail. We can utilise this channel information to bring the orange back into gamut and increase the apparent detail in the image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n