Colour Profiling

This guide will cover the differences between Adobe RGB and sRGB colour spaces and how to embed colour profiles into your images. Adobe Photoshop allows you to re-create on screen the colour space of an output device/printer. This, together with a correctly calibrated monitor, represents how you images will look when printed.

What is the correct colour?

There are two halves to seeing the correct colour! The first step is correctly calibrating your screen/monitor. An un-calibrated monitor will mis-represent every colour space. For more details about calibrating your screen please read our guide to screen calibration which can be found here. The second step is to choose a colour space for your images.

Colour space controls the number of colours which can be represented / made in an image. For example, the Adobe RGB colour space can represent around 50% of what the human eye perceives where as the sRGB  colour space only displays approximately 35%. To help visualize the difference, we have provided this diagram. This represents the range of colours which can be represented by sRGB (white shape) and Adobe RGB (black shape).  You can clearly see the extra 15% coverage Adobe RGB has, is this an advantage?

Re-producing the correct colour

Before you begin saving images in the Adobe RGB colour space, please consider what this means for your PRINTS! Current limitations in printing technology don't allow us to re-create the full range of sRGB colours. The diagram to the right now shows the range of colours which can be printed by an industry standard Fuji Frontier printer (grey shape). As the printable range of colours is smaller than that of sRGB, there is more scope for colour inconsistency if you send files saved in the Adobe RGB colour space. It is therefore always better to send images saved in the sRGB colour space as a smaller amount of colour information is lost during the printing process.

There is more to this subject than we have described above.  For the majority, knowing this much information may be all you need.  If you want to work on images with the greatest possibilities for colour (for archive or to be printed when technology advances) we would suggest shooting in Raw or scanning as a tif in 16bit colour mode and using the ProPhoto RGB colour space*. 

*Note: currently, few labs (if any) are capable of outputting these types of files.

Setting up your computer 

Every image you send to us would ideally have our colour profile embedded into it. This tells our printer the correct colour to print. You can download the colour profile for our printer here. Once applied in Photoshop (and with a correctly calibrated screen) you will have a very close representation of your finished print.

Installing the profile

Once you have downloaded our colour profile you must install it on your computer.

PC
1: You will now see cc-profile.icc stored on your desktop.

2: Right click profile icon and click install.

Mac
1: You will now see cc-profile.icc on your desktop.

2: Go to FINDER in your dock

3: Go to the LIBRARY folder and double click

4: Find the COLORSYNC folder and double click
5: You will see the PROFILE folder appear
6: Drag and drop the cc-profile.icc profile from your desktop into the PROFILE folder.

Applying colour profiles

To convert your image to our colour profile, follow the instructions below:

 1: Launch ADOBE Photoshop
 2: Open an image
 3: Go to IMAGE
 4: Go to MODE
 5: Go to 'convert to profile'
 6: Click on DESTINATION SPACE
 7: Select the cc-profile.icc profile
 8: Click OK

The Image will be converted to the profile. Any changes will be saved with the image.