Craig Stocks
Well-known member
I do some reproduction work for local artists, but not enough to warrant great expense. I'm looking for recommendations to improve what I'm currently doing, especially for good color matching.
My current process:
IQ 260 on a Phase One 645DF, Phase One 120 macro, Singh Ray polarizer
Four Alien Bee strobes with polarizing filters. I get quite a few glossy pieces and seem to need cross polarization most of the time, so I use it all of the time for consistency.
Shoot tethered to Capture One 8.2
I include an X-Rite color checker (the 8X10 version) and a printout of the color checker target's RGB values in ProPhoto RGB.
Shoot the art alone, the art with the color checker and a plain white foam core for LCC. Every camera position change gets a new LCC.
Apply the Flat Artwork profile and LCC.
Adjust exposure to ensure around 145,145,145 in the third gray patch (using ProPhoto as the active recipe) typically shoot at5.6. Adjust endpoints to around 245 (white target) and 24-30 (black target). White balance on the light gray target.
Process the art image and the color checker reference image to a 16-bit PSD.
Open in Photoshop. Use a Selective Color adjustment layer to tweak R,G,B,C,M,Y,K values to match the patch specifications (again in ProPhoto RGB). I then copy the Selective Color layer to the actual artwork image.
(I've not had good luck matching the RGB color values directly in C1. I find it very hard, if not impossible to adjust hue rotation and saturation to tweak RGB values toward an expected result. With Selective Color, I can directly adjust the RGB values in the adjustment to get an exact match to the target RGB values.)
Square up the artwork with Perspective Crop.
Sometimes I can re-use settings from a previous Selective Color and sometimes they need tweaked. I assume much of the variability comes from polarizing but color consistency of the Alien Bees may be an issue too.
Overall I feel like I get good results, but it can be tedious, especially tweaking the Selective Color settings. I make prints for some artists and the prints do match pretty well, but I run across quite a few out-of-gamut colors in the paintings that I just can't reproduce.
My goal is a workflow with predictable results and an absolute minimum amount of tweaking based on visual review.
(By the way, I also tried Lightroom / ACR with an X-Rite custom profile and it was not very close at all. The LR profiles seem to be geared toward bold, attractive colors rather than accurate colors.)
Any suggestions on how I can improve my workflow?
My current process:
IQ 260 on a Phase One 645DF, Phase One 120 macro, Singh Ray polarizer
Four Alien Bee strobes with polarizing filters. I get quite a few glossy pieces and seem to need cross polarization most of the time, so I use it all of the time for consistency.
Shoot tethered to Capture One 8.2
I include an X-Rite color checker (the 8X10 version) and a printout of the color checker target's RGB values in ProPhoto RGB.
Shoot the art alone, the art with the color checker and a plain white foam core for LCC. Every camera position change gets a new LCC.
Apply the Flat Artwork profile and LCC.
Adjust exposure to ensure around 145,145,145 in the third gray patch (using ProPhoto as the active recipe) typically shoot at5.6. Adjust endpoints to around 245 (white target) and 24-30 (black target). White balance on the light gray target.
Process the art image and the color checker reference image to a 16-bit PSD.
Open in Photoshop. Use a Selective Color adjustment layer to tweak R,G,B,C,M,Y,K values to match the patch specifications (again in ProPhoto RGB). I then copy the Selective Color layer to the actual artwork image.
(I've not had good luck matching the RGB color values directly in C1. I find it very hard, if not impossible to adjust hue rotation and saturation to tweak RGB values toward an expected result. With Selective Color, I can directly adjust the RGB values in the adjustment to get an exact match to the target RGB values.)
Square up the artwork with Perspective Crop.
Sometimes I can re-use settings from a previous Selective Color and sometimes they need tweaked. I assume much of the variability comes from polarizing but color consistency of the Alien Bees may be an issue too.
Overall I feel like I get good results, but it can be tedious, especially tweaking the Selective Color settings. I make prints for some artists and the prints do match pretty well, but I run across quite a few out-of-gamut colors in the paintings that I just can't reproduce.
My goal is a workflow with predictable results and an absolute minimum amount of tweaking based on visual review.
(By the way, I also tried Lightroom / ACR with an X-Rite custom profile and it was not very close at all. The LR profiles seem to be geared toward bold, attractive colors rather than accurate colors.)
Any suggestions on how I can improve my workflow?