Back to the mines.
01:33

So. A couple of weeks ago (before some travel) I went and bought some 13"x19" Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster. Epson claims "Highest color gamut available for vivid color reproduction" - examining the profile shows it has the same gamut as the ultra premium special edition photo paper glossy (who invents these names?). In fact I kind of think these are the same profiles, just renamed.

In any case, it's reasonably close to the results of soft proofing. So I've been doing some work with it - first with my Russian Hill pic,

and now with a recent shot of the Golden Gate Bridge (which Kendra and I shot last night):

And they've come out fairly well - in particular the first one has given me a really lovely blue for the sky. They're not perfect, but good. A lot of the colors wind up out of gamut, though. There are a few ways to deal with that.

You can mess around with saturation, but that's going to suck, because you might have to desaturate a lot. Blah.

You can also lighten the image - this seems to bring the color back into gamut. It seems like it'd be useful to have some program which actually compares image and output gamuts and thus could suggest specific things to do to bring the colors all back in-gamut.

Futzing around with the hue could maybe work, but... yeah, dunno about that.

Note that select by color range offers "out of gamut colors", which I spent some time looking for (elsewhere of course), which is enormously convenient. If they're all mostly the same color, anyway. If that gives you two different colors then you probably don't want to process them the same way...

I've been sharpening with PS's Smart Sharpen filer, and printing test strips or sections with different amounts of sharpening. Note that it helps to make your test sheet image the same resolution as your actual image when doing that. I have to say that learning how to sharpen effectively sounds really tedious and uninteresting. I'm tempted to shell out for PhotoKit sharpener just to avoid learning the half-dozen sharpening options in PS and the near-infinitude of behaviors in each.

Anyway, more later (of course). But I'm back.