To deal with images, you need the fastest biggest machine you can handle. See the Hardware Advice section for some details of what I use. Since I insist on using IBM PC equipment for various arcane reasons, some of this article will be specific to the PC, but all of it should apply to the Mac in general terms.
To send images out to Processing Houses or Photo Finishers, and for backup and archive, you need ZIP, JAZ, and/or a writeable CD-ROM. I have all three. I use the JAZ to export images to processors and the CD-ROM for archive. See the Storage Advice section.
For input I have a Nikon LS30 slide/film scanner which is good but a bit disappointing in feature set, and an old UMAX SE-6 flatbed scanner which still clunks along just fine. You can also get film transferred to PhotoCD disks fairly cheaply and with good resolution. See the Scanning Advice section.
For output I'm fully Epson-printerized. I use a 700 for proofing and regular output, and a 3000 for art prints. You can also send your completed images out to photo finishers to make various kinds of prints and slides. See the Output Advice section.
Software consists of PhotoShop 5.5, the Horses Matchlock profiling plugin, and Graphic Workshop Pro. Plus lots of useful miscellany. There are options to PhotoShop (for less $$$) but if you're serious about it there isn't any point. See the Software Advice section.
Color setup is arcane at best. See the Color Management Advice section for the best I've been able to do so far. Also see the CMYK Mode Digression -- Soft Proofing section for instructions on how to better preview your images before wasting ink and paper on test prints.
And finally, to print an image, see the Color
Workflow section....
I run a Hitachi Elite 751 20” monitor at 1600x1200 with a 75Hz refresh and 24bit 'TrueColor' output. Anything smaller and I'm constantly zooming and panning, any larger and I can't see the stupid cursor. And any lower refresh rate will turn your eyes into mush. TrueColor is good when you get to looking at gradients (slow cross fades from one color to another). Otherwise the 16bit (65000 colors) mode is sufficient, until you begin to wonder if those slight color bands you see are really in the image or not.
I drive the monitor with an 3dfx (STB Systems) Lightspeed 3300 display card with 16Mb of video memory (you should only need 8Mb for this resolution, but it came with 16). I tried an equivalent ATI card but had stability problems on my system under NT so I swapped out. Most modern PCI and AGP video cards can handle 24bit color with those speeds and feeds, but make sure you carefully check that the combination of monitor, resolution, refresh rate, and color depth is supported by both your hardware and the drivers for your OS. I had trouble getting the right drivers for NT 3.51 and ended up with a 60Hz refresh rate for about a year. You don't need any of the fancy 3D card features for image editing, but you might want them for games or video.
I use a Calcomp Drawing Slate II 6x9” pen pad for drawing, painting, and masking. Once you get used to drawing while looking at the screen it works very well. The pad interfaces through a serial port. By chance or luck the pad works in parallel with the standard mouse (I use a Alps touch pad, but same difference). If they didn't work together it would be a major pain because the pad is a little ‘noisy’ when trying to click while drawing. But as it is, I can draw with the pen and click with the mouse (to set endpoints, etal) at the same time. (I'm right handed but I use the mouse with my left just to be obnoxious, and make it easier to type in general, and that means I can use both pen and mouse at the same time....).
For backing-up work in progress you have the same problem. (You do back-up don't you?). Using 100Mb ZIPs is like using 5.25” floppies used to be... The 1Gb JAZ is much easier to deal with. However the JAZ drives and media are significantly more expensive and failure prone. Caveat Emptor.
For archiving, you can't beat writeable CD-ROMs. And you could probably solve all your problems with a re-writable CD-ROM when the media cost comes down. Currently you can get write-once blanks for well under a dollar if you watch your sales flyers, but the re-writable ones are still $$.
The added advantage of the CD-ROM is that just about anyone can read it now, even Macs. So if you save images in some common format you can use it as a portfolio as well as a backup. ZIP and JAZ media are also cross platform readable (MAC<->PC), but not as commonly available. Remember....you should have more than one copy of your finished work, and keep one in a safe place for a rainy day. And consider a rainy day when one of the 'standard' media is no longer readable too.
Speaking of common formats...I’d advise that you archive the native format for your editing software, e.g., PhotoShop .psd, files because you can keep layers and masks and other useful components of the finished image and continue to mess around with them forever. Also save a reduced screen size version as a .jpg (JPEG) so you can view it easily. And if you are paranoid about the longevity of your particular tool’s format, save an LZW compressed .tif (TIFF) file too.
When it comes to 'standard' image storage formats there are too many choices. The basic ones are:
As far as resolution is concerned, manufacturers usually quote two numbers. One is the Maximum, and often goes up to 4800-9600 Dots per Inch (DPI). The other, more important one, is the Optical which is usually 300-600 DPI these days. The Optical resolution is the actual number of Picture Elements (pixels, or little square atoms of image) you can get. All the higher Maximum rez’s give you is more data to copy. You can scale the images yourself later if you want them bigger. I'll go into resolution and image sizes a bit later in this section.
Note: All scanners produce image files which are just two-dimensional arrays of pixels that get displayed in some pre-defined order, say 1200 lines each containing 1600 pixels. When you scan pages of text, you get an image that looks like any other image to the computer. If you want to get the text out of the image you need some extra Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This software is pretty sophisticated these days and does a reasonable job on good quality images, and it is usually shipped with the home scanners. So, if you want to store or edit the text on pages that you have scanned, you need to go the extra step with the OCR software.
For film and slide scanning, many flatbed scanners have an accessory you can buy. Most of these are just a backlight so you put the film on the glass and scan it directly. Using the Optical resolution of the scanner this gives you fairly small images from 35mm film. These images are sufficient for Web publishing but no better than scanning a 4x6 print. For making larger blowups you need a lot more to start with, so you should use a real film scanner.
The short-term solution to the film scanner problem is to have your negs and slides transferred to a Kodak Master PhotoCD. The Master PhotoCD file contains five resolutions of the same image, with the maximum being 2048x3072 pixels from a 35mm original. This resolution is usually fine for up to 11x14” prints if you don't crop too much. You can also have a Professional PhotoCD made which has another higher rez scan (4096x6144 pixels), and can also handle large format (up to 8x10) originals. Master scans can be had for $1-3 each whereas the Pro scans are in the $10 region. Both are delivered on a standard CD-ROM which can be read by just about any computer. Most professional photo finishing houses can make PhotoCDs for you, and you can find cheaper mail-order houses in photo magazines with various turn-around times. Look in the Yellow Pages and Popular Photography. I used Custom Process in Berkeley, CA, until I got my film scanner.
When you get really rich and stupid you can get your own film scanner. Nikon makes some good, and not un-reasonably priced scanners, as do HP and Minolta. I got the Nikon CoolScan III (LS30) based on price and maximum resolution, and some kibitzing on the photo related news groups. The HPs and Minoltas are cheaper, but lower resolution and reputedly harder to use. The LS30 will scan up to 2500 DPI, giving a final image of about 2500x3800 from a 35mm original. This is 50% larger than the PhotoCD, so you can see the film grain pretty clearly from a 200ASA Kodak Gold original. The only problem I have had with the Nikon is in getting it to interface on my SCSI bus: it seems to insist on being the master of my UMAX, so I have to power it down and reboot if I want to use the page scanner....stupid but livable.
My only quibbles with the Nikon are with the level of automation. You can't adjust the exposure level, or gain, on negatives, but only on slides where you have a narrower contrast range to start with. What this means is that it is harder to recover over-exposed negatives. The scanner also seems to insist on doing contrast range compression (spreading the scanned pixel values over the whole available range). This means that when you scan a very low contrast film, you will get a broader range of output values in the image than you might expect. I discovered this when I tried to scan a blank negative to make a vignette correction mask for an uneven wide-angle lens. The resulting image had a nearly black border and a white center even though the original film looked almost even to the naked eye.
With all that said, being able to scan film on demand, and at a much higher resolution, has made my digital photographic experience much more plastically enjoyable.
About image sizes and resolutions: Obviously the more pixels you have the finer the image is going to be, size does matter. But enough is enough already. Given that the current crop of printers can put out 740DPI, does your original image have to be that large? Nope.
For photographic images I find that somewhere between 180 and 240 DPI is fine. This means that the original image for a 13x20 print from a full frame 35mm negative can be from 2340x3600 to 3120x4800 pixels. This makes your image files somewhere between 25Mb and 50Mb, which is why I don't recommend the 100Mb ZIP drive as a storage media....
For graphic images the story is somewhat worse because they usually have sharp edges and distinct color boundaries. At a 180DPI resolution you may see ‘jaggies’ on the edges. However the printer scaling software may be able to rise to the occasion. Some experimentation will be necessary to see how your images will look at scale.
You may also find that the printer scaling software is not as good as
the image editor's. When you print on a 740DPI device, someone has to generate
each pixel for the printer. If you start with the 180DPI original and send
it directly to the printer, the printer driver will do the scaling, usually
using pixel replication. This can lead to more of the 'jaggies'. However
if you use PhotoShop to scale the image to 740DPI first, you can take advantage
of the more intelligent interpolation algorythms in the editor software.
The tradeoff is that it requires a LOT of memory (the180DPI,
25Mb image mentioned above suddenly becomes 200Mb) and takes longer to
send to the printer.
If you have trouble with definition and jagged edges in your prints
you may want to experiment with pre-fitting the image to the printer resolution,
or some sub-multiple of the final rez.
That all said, why not just use a digital camera? Well sure. But given
that you get about 6M pixels from a PhotoCD, and 9M pixels from the Nikon
scanner, you can see that the high end 2-3M pixel cameras have a way to
go yet. However they make up for quite a bit of the resolution loss by
not having grain, so the images look smoother to start with. Digital will
win eventually, but I'm too heavily invested in film for the time being.
The older Epson 700, 1520, and 3000 printers do a very credible job of printing images. The difference between them is the number of color inks they use and the size of the paper they can handle. The 700 prints on 8-1/2" wide paper using 5 colors, and black. The two ‘extra’ colors are lighter versions of cyan and magenta, and output a little subtler tonality. The 1520 and 3000 use 3 colors and black, but they take up to 17x44” paper and make 16x42” images.
The trick with the 3000 (aside from being more solidly constructed) is that it takes huge ink cartridges. Whereas I can go through a set of color carts on the 700 in 15 8x10 images, I can do way over 100 16x20 pages on the 3000 from one ink set. And the carts are separate so you only have to replace the ones that run out, not the whole set. The 1520 has the small, one-box, cartridges like the 700, so the operating cost can mount pretty quickly.
One little annoyance with the 3000 is the ‘pizza-wheel’ paper guide mechanism. It leaves tracks on the thicker papers that can sometimes actually damage the surface, especially on glossy papers. There are instructions on the web for overcoming this. I haven't tried it yet, but may need to soon: http://www.tssphoto.com/sp/dg/pizza_wheel.html
Epson also has 7000 and 9000 printers for the monetarily extravagant. The 9000 prints on 44” paper, and can do a really beautiful job.
Look online, or Ebay, etc., for good deals on new printers in the box. I'd be careful with used ones though.
The standard Epson inks are not known for their longevity. Five years was considered a good thing. But you can get archival inks in the after market that last from 25 to 100 years for most of the Epsons. You can also get a 4 level gray, QuadTone, set for very accurate black and white printing if you want to specialize.
And Epson inks are not known for their inexpensiveness either. So there is a whole after market of cheap inks, cart refilling kits and other kinds of inks and pigments that you can use. I've found that the refilling options are messy and prone to clogging. The really cheap inks are just that, quick to fade and bad color to start with (however some of that can be corrected, see Color Management).
There are a slew of new Epson printers out now, and they all have a new ink cartridge setup that contains a micro-chip to make their ink level sensing more accurate. The side effect of this is that you can't refill the carts yourself, and no one but Epson can produce inks, yet at least. So they seem to have bottled up the razor blade market finally. On the plus side the new inks are reputed to be 200 year archival, but this has yet to be independently verified, and there have been problems reported when using certain papers.
All of the Epsons will feed the lighter weight art papers, up to 250lb or so, by hand if not from a stack. They can print on just about anything they can feed, but remember that the inks are water soluble and prone to smearing. The hot setup for home printmaking is a good watercolor paper, an archival ink, and decent color correction profiles. For extra money you an get specially coated watercolor papers, and glossy photo papers that produce excellent prints. They are not cheap though.
In my Epson 3000 I use LumiJet Silver (25 year) archival ink and print on Somerset Velvet, Somerset Velvet ink jet Coated, or Lysonic Photo Gloss depending on the result I'm after (and the amount I want to spend on it). I chose against the LumiJet Platinum (75 year) inks because they had a very tricky gamut (not such good color) and if someone still likes the print after 25 years I'll make them a new one. There are other archival inks for the Epson printers, Lysonic for one, but the LumiJet was recommended to me so I'm passing it along. MIS Associates produces a set of archival pigment inks (the usual ones are dyes) and also makes refil kits for many printers. These bear an examination that I haven't yet done.
I tried Osprey ink jet coated and Weber-Valentine Glossy papers, but was less pleased with the results compared to the Somerset and Lysonic. This is unfortunate because the latter are quite a bit more expensive. However they seem to be worth the money if you want the best photo results. The difference between the Somerset Velvet and Coated papers is dramatic as well. The coated paper has much better saturation but looks almost the same as the regular watercolor paper. It costs about 5 times as much, so you need to consider the effect you are looking for first. I choose Somerset because it is the whitest of the chemical-free watercolor papers. You may find Arches or Rives to be more your style though.
I got some really cheap-o inks for the Epson 700 on EBay. They fade from really horrible color to just dull, but I can compensate using the MatchLock profile software so it doesn't matter too much for proofing and day to day use. The 700 will print on art papers, but I usually use the Epson photo ink jet paper, or just regular printer paper for text.
You can also get clear over-coats for final finishing, and UV/water protection. The really good ones, like Lyson Print Guard and Optima Millennium XE cost more than the inks. If you are going to frame your prints under glass a coating may not be necessary. I have used the Krylon Crystal UV spray (quite a bit cheaper per square inch) on cards to some good effect though.
You can get papers, inks, and lots more good information from InkjetMall
and InkjetArt among others.
I'll go into printer setup and use in the Color Management
section below.
The most common professional output is usually to film using a Film Recorder. You can get most sizes from 35mm to 4x5” in both slide and negative format. Generally you will want 35mm slides for your portfolio, and maybe 35mm or 4x5 negatives which can be used to produce any sort of ‘normal’ photographic print. Often there will be two price ranges, based on the resolution of your original. For instance, Custom Process charges one price for “4K”, or less than 4000x4000 pixel, images, and a higher price for “8K”, or 8000x8000 pixel, images. (If you are a real professional, and have 8K images, you probably shouldn't be reading this document....). The advantage of an inter-negative is that you can make multiples fairly cheaply on real photographic papers; and since you have already done all the retouching, you probably don't need custom prints so they are significantly cheaper. If you are going this route you probably should spring for the 4x5 negative as well....
Images will be scaled to fit into the aspect of the given film format and will have black (positive) backgrounds. This is basically exactly what you'd want for your portfolio slide. When making slides you need to account for the cropping of the slide mount, so you should add about a 5% black border to your image files. (If your image is 1000x2000 pixels, increase the canvas size -- in PhotoShop -- to 1100x2100, and center the image on black).
You can also have direct digital prints made using Dye Sublimation, Fujix, Lightjet, Color Laser, Ink Jet, and other processes. DyeSubs and Fujix are usually in the 11x14 or smaller range and I've found them to look identical to standard glossy photographs, however they are reputedly not as archival and somewhat more expensive than the interneg route when doing multiples. There are larger format HP and Ink Jet printers that can do convincing jobs on posters and banners. The Lightjet printers can also do larger formats and make very convincing photographic prints. In fact both Fujix and Lightjet actually print on photo papers. Shop around your local photo and poster printers, like Kinkos even, for possibilities and prices. Also see these websites for processors that have been recommended to me: Colorfolio and Calypso.
The final option is Iris (a brand of printer, like Kleenex....) or Giclee (literally 'ink spray' in French) printing. Iris is a big deal in the art-print world these days because it can produce great looking prints on demand, so editions can be made as they are sold rather than all at once. Prints are usually made on one of a number of art papers, Somerset, Arches, Rives, etc., and use archival inks. Iris prints are usually in the region of 3x4 feet, and smaller images can be ganged together if they can be color corrected the same. The Iris print usually has a better saturation of color and black density than the ink jet print, but the gap is closing. There are many processing houses that can do Iris prints for you, for varying prices. They will often work directly with the artist in a residency sort of situation to produce editions of work, but they also take work in off the street as it were. You can find them on the net if you look for Iris or Giclee. I have used The FinerImage in Van Nuys, CA, and have talked with August Editions in San Luis Obispo, CA. They will usually insist on doing proofs and have some issues with color matching, so you have to be prepared to deal with professional printers in their own language.
Most processing houses will accept images on any media in any format,
but may have a preference for one format and charge for conversion. Of
course, the two that I have used in Berkeley each want different files.
Custom
Process wants .tif (TIFF) files, and Cantoo
Graphics wants .tga (Targa) files. So there is no use storing them
on CD-ROMs....In most cases the files should be in Landscape (horizontal)
mode, meaning larger-by-smaller dimension, and have to be rotated 90 degrees
if they are not. Get the specs from the company before submitting data.
Most of them will help you with color correction, either by giving you
samples to match up or discounting the first test images.
That said there are options.... JASC PaintShop Pro is shareware, Corel PhotoPaint is getting better, and even MicroSoft is trying to horn into the market. Adobe and Corel both have reduced function ‘baby’-image-editors that ship with most scanners. They're ok for doing your family photo album, but you will need the real thing eventually. So shop around.
My other piece of indispensable software is Alchemy Mindworks’ Graphic WorkShop Pro. It is an image cataloger and viewer, file manager, and format converter. It can batch process files. It can display thumbnails of all your images. It walks on water. Of course it has feet of clay, is a bit clunky, and can't do everything a regular file manager does (like create directories....jeez guys), but it works, and its inexpensive shareware. I have standardized all my archive CDs to contain its thumbnail files so I can browse my images in tiny format when I'm looking for something. Get it. And pay for it. There are other shareware image managers around, but I'm used to this one and it works great.
And a true gem is the Horses, now owned by Datacolor, MatchLock Profiler Pshop plugin. It can create a color profile for your printer/paper/ink combination and remove 80% of the headaches of color correction when printing. Unfortunately it only runs on Mac and Win98 (not NT). However the profiles can be used on any system that can deal with them. They have a profile editor (Profile Doctor Pro) as well that is also pretty slick, but not really necessary for the everyday operation. The fact that the authors are close friends of mine has nothing to do with it. I converted my old PC, used to drive the Epson 3000, to Win98 just so I could use MatchLock. It is worth the constant gnawing pain of Win98. See the Color Management section for details.
Get Plug-in Manager, Filter Factory, and many free filters from just about any Pshop web site. E.G. And if you are really nuts about making filters, Adobe has an SDK you can download.
A few years ago I found a cool image processing scripting shareware, BMPwiz. It lets you write ‘C’ like code to manipulate images and hides all the nasty memory management and access details that you would need to know otherwise. In the same time frame I also found a shareware raster to vector converter, Kvec, that has been useful every once in a while for making engineering drawings from scanned images. You can still find these on various shareware sites, search using the names.
Get Illustration, Paint, Layout, and CAD programs as you see fit. I have DrafixCAD and TurboCAD, and some Serif desktop publishing tools that were all cheap or free and you basically get what you pay for. If you plan to do a lot of drawing and illustration you will need Illustrator or some other sophisticated vector based painting program. I don't use them so I don't know one from another. If you plan to do many page layouts, more than one image on a page with text, you'll need a desktop publishing program like Quark or PageMaker. If you are doing a lot of text, books and such, use FrameMaker for gods sake. MSWord sucks.
Also if you are a Font-a-holic, get a copy of FontViewer, a freebe from PC Magazine. It lets you actually see fonts while you select them. What kind of concept is that?
And, totally un-solicited and un-appropos, try Mijinix
PowerDesk. It is a much better replacement for MicroSlop’s Explorer
file manager. It costs a few dollars, but it has so many more useful features
that you will be lost when visiting machines that don't have it.
The main problem is that the computer screen is a light source, and thus uses Primary colored -- Red/Green/Blue (RGB) -- lights (phosphors on the screen) to make all the colors that you see. All output processes end up being Secondary Color -- Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black (CMYK) -- processes...you can demure about photo slides, but the argument basically holds. As such, the color mixing techniques are different, and worse, the color range and saturation (Gamut) of each device just don't match. Plus none of the devices is anywhere near linear in its response over the brightness range it can handle. Printed output usually has a much smaller gamut than the screen so surprises abound. If this is gobbledegook to you, you need to go learn some basic color theory. Id like to help, but books have already been written.
To address the difference in color response you can ‘profile’ your device to make some kind of, hopefully, system independent description of its capabilities. The mechanism to do this is beyond me, but I can follow the step by step ‘WorkFlow’ fairly well. This is all driven by the CMM and ICC specs that you can find sprinkled around the web.
I’ll try to explain what I do in the following....
If you have the gamma program, use it and follow the instructions exactly. If you don't have it do the best you can with brightness using a black square on screen background and punt on the colors:
In any case to cut to the setup chase:
IMPORTANT -- In File->Color Settings->Profile Setup dialog:
In the File->Color Settings->RGB Setup dialog:
(You should see the name of your monitor profile, probably “Monitor: Adobe Monitor Settings.icm”). The settings here should be:
I have tried profiles for scanners but have gotten awful results. You may have more luck with more modern scanners than the ones I have. Also, if you try to use the color adjustments in the scanner software you will probably screw up the data for the profile conversion. More info is needed here....
I also made an ad-hoc color chart using Pantone swatches from an art store and tried to adjust the scanned image to match the same internally selectable values on the Colors Pallet. I saved the Hue and Color Balance adjustments as an Action so I can repeat it. It works sometimes....
Mostly I take what I can get from the scanner, or PhotoCD, or whatever,
and fiddle with it using Curves and Levels and HSB adjustments until it
looks OK. Checking against Histograms and the Info pallet will give you
a good idea that the original image data is well balanced. More treatises
have been written about color correction and image editing than I have
been able to read, so go find one you like for yourself.
You can get canned profiles for many printer/paper/ink combinations, and you can buy specific profiles, from InkJetMall for instance, for your choice set. But the really cool setup is to be able to generate them yourself using the MatchLock software. In my experience, using the LumiJet Silver inks, the canned profiles from Luminos were ok, but the MatchLock generated profiles blew them out of the water. There are other profiling software packages but I haven't tried them and I like MatchLock for many reasons.
When printing images using a profile make sure you shut off all printer color management, set the printer to maximum resolution, and Photo-Quality Ink Jet Paper. Depending on the printer you should also select the finest half-toning and ‘MicroWeave’ing, and the slowest speed you can. You can set all of this from the Advanced popup of the Epson driver's Properties panel. Save these settings from the Advanced panel, and load them as a Custom Mode from the main driver panel whenever you print using profiles. If you are using commercial profiles skip to the next Color Workflow section
Now, assuming you are MatchLocking....install the plugin and follow their instructions exactly. Print the test image using the printer, ink, and paper you are interested in, making sure you shut off color management. Then scan the print at 300 DPI on your scanner. Make sure you also shut off all color adjustments on the scanner, and set the gamma to 1.50. Some scanners will try to ‘help’ you no matter what, so you need to figure out how to trick them into giving you a completely flat scan.
Once scanned, let MatchLock do its magic. I have found that boosting both the brightness and contrast to 8 in the MatchLock window gives me a better result. This may be due to my scanner or monitor settings so you need to do some iterations by using the profile to print a known image (and maybe doing a little fiddling with the monitor settings) until you are satisfied.
Due to the idiot nature of Pshop, you need to exit and restart the program to be able to use the new profile. Profiles should be stored in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\color directory (or where ever your OS is loaded) and will have a .icm extension. You may copy the file to other machines, in the same directory hierarchy, as you wish. If you are copying from a PC to a Mac you need to use the Mac RegEdit program to fiddle it. See here for details.
If you are just to indigent to be able to afford MatchLock and/or other
commercial profiles, or have another good excuse, click
here....
Note that this same profile is used when you convert your image using the Image->Mode->CMYK Color menu selection. The difference is that the View->Preview selection is temporary and the Image->Mode selection is permanent. In the Mode case you don't get your original colors back if you change back to RGB. So be careful.
The whole point of the CMYK modes and Previews is to do pre-press work on images for offset litho and other normal mass printing devices. That's what all the built-in Profile options are for. I'm sure there is a good book someplace that describes this process, but I haven't seen it yet, nor have I seen any treatment of soft proofing images for inkjet printing that clearly discusses the uses and possibilities of the CMYK Color Settings....so here goes....
It is possible to generate a CMYK profile that can be applied in Preview so that What-You-See is What-You-Get from your ink jet printer, or reasonably close. Therefore you can use the CMYK Preview and Gamut Warnings to soft proof your images and correct colors that just will not print right. PhotoShop 6 is reputed to be able to do this fairly easily, but I haven't upgraded yet. However you can do the same things using Pshop5.5 in a couple ways, as long as you have a good profile for your output device.
The first way is from page 188 of Real World Photoshop, which is a great book by the way, this (slightly paraphrased and improved) method from Photoshop Chief Architect Mark Hamburg, will set your CMYK preview for a specific device/paper/ink combination:
1. In Photoshop, open the two Calibration Sources files named Lab Colors and CMYK Colors. On the PC, they are both .tif files in the Photoshop\Goodies\Adobe Photoshop Only\Calibration directory (coincidentally, where the Adobe Gamma program resides).Again, Photoshop 6 will do most of the above for you, given a good printer profile to start with.2. Select the Lab Colors image and add an alpha channel filled with white, i.e., create a new channel and use the paint bucket to fill it with white (0, 0, 0). Then select all the channels for viewing.
3. Using the Image->Mode->Profile to Profile dialog, convert the Lab Colors image to the profile you wish to preview, i.e., use Lab Color as the "From:" profile, and your printer profile as the "To:". Use the Built-in engine and Perceptual Intent, with NO Black Point Compensation.
4. Save the converted Lab file in the RAW file format, named something like <profile>_toCMYK. In the Save as Raw dialog use: Type = 8BST, Creator = 8BIM, Header = 0, Interleaved Order.
(It appears that this is the default on the PC and that many of the dialog items can't be changed?!)5. Close the Lab file and continue on to the CMYK file.
6. Convert the CMYK Colors image to Multichannel by selecting Image->Mode->Multichannel,
and then convert it to RGB using Image->Mode->RGB Color. This will re-label the channels.7. Discard the Black channel in the Channels window by dumping it in the trash.
8. Using the Image->Mode->Profile to Profile dialog, convert the CMYK Colors image from the profile you wish to preview to Lab Color, i.e., use your same printer profile as the "From:" profile, and Lab Color as the "To:". Use the Built-in engine, Relative Colormetric Intent, and turn Black Point Compensation ON.
9. Save the converted CMYK file in the RAW file format, named something like <profile>_fromCMYK. In the Save as Raw dialog use: Type = 8BST, Creator = 8BIM, Header = 0, Interleaved Order.
11. Close the CMYK file.
12. Go to your File Manager and rename the two new files, changing their extensions from .raw to .ast. This is apparently not necessary on Macs, but vital on PCs.
13. Open the File->Color Settings->CMYK Setup dialog and select the Tables CMYK Model.
14. Load the two new files, one at a time. First click Load and open the ...fromCMYK.ast file,
then click Load again and open the ...toCMYK.ast file. You should see the file names listed in the appropriate locations in the dialog box.15. You may then, optionally, click Save to create an ICC profile which can be used in place of the tables you just created the next time you want to use this particular setup. It should be saved, or copied, into the Windows\system32\Color directory for use. See the below for what to do with this profile.
The second technique involves using the MatchLock software to produce the CMYK profile and then just loading it into Photoshop. To produce the profile, follow the usual profile building instructions (with the scanned target, etal) but select CMYK instead of RGB as the profile type. I have tried both of these methods and gotten different results. However both profiles do a better preview job than the built-ins. I think I prefer the MatchLock generated CMYK profile, but ya gotta have the software...
After you have a CMYK profile for your printer (produced by the Real World, MatchLock, or other methods) you can use it in Photoshop by loading it in the CMYK Setup dialog:
1. Open the File->Color Settings->CMYK Setup dialog and select the ICC CMYK Model. You will be asked if you want to discard your current Table settings. Go ahead and say OK.After you click OK in the CMYK Setup dialog, the CMYK Preview and Gamut Warnings will use your printer profile. When you select either of the Preview options, you should see a reasonably good simulacra of your printed output. Remember that this will also affect any Mode conversions to CMYK that you do, so you will have to go back to the CMYK Setup to select the correct settings. You may change these settings any time you want to preview a different printer/paper/ink combination.2. You will then see the ICC Options dialog. Open the Profile you wish to use. Note: you will have to restart PhotoShop if the contents of the Windows\system32\Color directory was changed while Pshop was running. Otherwise you may not see your newly generated files. Also select Built-in Engine, and Perceptual Intent, with Black Point OFF (or you can experiment with Black Point, I don't think it makes a big difference either way). You can also load an .icm profile from the Tables dialog as in steps 13 and 14 above.
3. Click OK...
The point of this exercise is to get to the Gamut Warning where you
can then adjust the colors and saturation of your image to not blow out
the printed output. Try it out, you may find that you can clear up a lot
of those blocked up colors in your prints with a little Replace Color lightening,
darkening, or de-saturateing.
I don't believe what Adobe says about how Pshop manages profile conversions on input so I shut it all off and just assume that I'm in Adobe RGB. It seems to work for me. See the Software Setup section above....
Once you think you are ready to print, try setting the View->Preview->CMYK and View->Gamut Warning modes to see, and adjust for, color shifts that may occur (again see the Software Setup section for some details). Check your image size settings to make sure they are right for the printer and save a final copy of your work. Then flatten the layers just to save memory and time.
At this point you can use the Unsharp Mask filter to boost the edge contrast a bit so the prints look crisper. This is a black-art unto itself, so I'm not going into it here...maybe later....The amount of sharpening to apply will vary with the print size and paper dot gain etal, so some experiments are necessary. In general, sharpening the entire image evenly is not a good idea, but sharpening single color channels or detail areas can work wonders.
Rotate the image if it needs it. You can purge your history at this point to get a little more memory to work with if you like. Then go to the Image->Mode->Profile-to-Profile menu selection. In the dialog that appears select:
On Windows 98 (and, I believe, on the Mac) you can skip the Profile-to-Profile conversion steps by using the Color Space selector in the Print dialog box. On these operating systems you should be able to load the printer profile for the driver to use directly and avoid making a separate converted image. If you do not use this Color Space option, make sure it is set to generic RGB. In either case shut off Printer Color Management.
Then:
I hope I covered all these topics well enough that you can muddle through.What hardware and software you really need; Where to get your digital image data, from a scanner or a PhotoCD; How to setup the system for reasonably repeatable color reproduction; How to interpret all the confusing information about PhotoShop color settings; How to talk to the photo finisher who will make output for you; What Printer Profiles are and how to use them; What inks and papers you want to use with your printer.