tainted_heart opened this issue on Sep 06, 2009 ยท 14 posts
cspear posted Fri, 11 September 2009 at 11:27 AM
The real answer to this conundrum is a color-managed workflow, which is tricky as no 3D modelling / rendering apps have color management support - except lightwave, through an optional plug-in.
However, if - like most people - you create your scenes and render them so that they look good on your monitor, there is a way to color-manage the renders, assuming you have a colour managed image editing application - I think most of them are these days.
Step 1 is to calibrate and profile your monitor. If you have hardware for doing this, great. If not, try the links here. Those tools will help you build some sort of profile. If you have Photoshop, you should have Adobe Gamma in your Control Panels - use this if available. The important thing is to end up with an ICC profile for your monitor: this describes how your monitor specifically displays color and deals with brightness and contrast. Name the profile something meaningful: 'MyMonitor_dd/mm/yy' for example. The bit at the end is the date: perform calibration and/or profiling regularly.
Step 2 is to open your render in (for example) Photoshop. It should warn you that the image file has no attached profile. If it doesn't, set up your prefs so that it does. Then you need to assign your monitor profile to the image. Then you can convert it to your favoured RGB colour space: sRGB, AdobeRGB or whatever. If given the choice, select perceptual rendering intent. You've then color-managed the render. Only at this stage should you make any mild corrections or tweaks. When you save the file, make sure the color profile is embedded. Don't mix up assigning a profile and converting to a profile, they are different things!
What you do next depends on what kind of print service you're going for: the only advice I can give is, if in doubt, convert the file to sRGB (if it isn't there already).
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