AP- Soft Proof - Gamut Warning with false color overlay

[kirkt]

A workflow that ultimately results in a print can benefit greatly from a color managed environment and soft-proofing for print.  In pretty much every pixel editor and raw conversion application that provides soft-proofing, the gamut warning overlay is simply a single color that indicates, presumably, that those indicated pixels are out of gamut.  Unfortunately, the gamut warning does not indicate how far out of gamut (in terms of dE, for example) so the warning is not very useful.  It would be nice if the Soft Proof adjustment layer had a gamut warning that, when enabled, completely replaced the current working image with a false color map of the image where pixels in gamut, and up to a user-defined acceptable dE threshold (like dE=1 or 2), were green; pixels within a second user-defined dE interval were yellow (dE = 2-4) and pixels outside a third user-defined dE were red (dE > 4), or something similar.  Because soft-proofing in AP is an adjustment layer, the user could pull down the opacity of this false-color map and overlay it on the original image to identify the areas on the image that fall within the most out-of-gamut regions and implement local adjustments to those areas without making global changes to areas where the issue is not such a problem.  Because the rendering intent can be selected in the adjustment layer drop-down, the effect of rendering intent would be more informative by examining how the most problematic areas out of gamut get mapped toward, or into, the output gamut, instead of simply relying on the current gamut warning which is a go/no-go indicator.  

 

This approach would be really helpful in isolating specific problem areas of an image so that the user could make more informed and targeted decisions about transforming and correcting an image in a large working space, such as ProPhoto, to a smaller output space for a particular printer/paper combination.

 

The only utility where I have seen this feature is in ColorThink, which is an application specifically intended to explore color profiles and compare images against profiles for purposes such as evaluating gamut and gamut mapping.

 

Thank you for you consideration!

 

Kirk Thibault

Berwyn, PA

[kirkt]

Here is an example of the workflow in color think.

 

kirk

[kirkt]

The user could also make selections on the Soft Proof false color map of particular colored pixels (red, for example) and then use that selection to make a mask for an adjustment layer, such as hue-sat, to isolate just the areas on the original OOG image where an adjustment might be necessary.

 

kirk