quote:
Originally posted by witzkestudio:
[qb] I like to keep my profiles consistant between my imput and output.
They are called profiles for a reason.
[/qb]
Hi, Witzkestudio. I'm glad to hear this works for you, but unless I misunderstand what you're doing, I think you're probably not getting the best images you potentially could be.
The reason it's important to
not use the same profiles for all your devices is that they aren't all capable of producing the same range of colors. When you have a specific profile for each device, the computer can have the following conversation with itself:
"Gee, this is really a gorgeous blue sky in this photo. It's a good thing the monitor is able to show off what a nice sky the photographer captured. It's too bad the printer isn't capable of printing a blue quite this rich and lovely, though. I guess I could tell it to print the photo without any further instructions, but it just wouldn't look right because the printer can't print a blue that's as amazing as the monitor can display. But thankfully, the photographer has given me a profile of what his printer can and can't do, so instead of just passing along the instruction to print the photo as-is, I'm going to do some calculations and give the printer slightly different instructions, based on what I know it's capable of, that will come a lot closer to the on-screen image than if I just pass the photo along as-is."
By having device-specific profiles, the computer can calculate what the best alterations to the image are en route to the printer -- alterations that don't make the final output look
less like what you see on-screen, but
more like what you see on-screen.
If you've figured out a workflow that produces nice images using one profile for all devices, that's great. But knowing how color profiling works, I'm inclined to think you've gotten lucky, and that your output would look even better (perhaps with smoother gradations, better detail in highlights and shadows, etc) with proper profiling.
