Today we have a very special guestblog by Martin de Bouter.
He is specialized in color, something where without a doubt my heart is, and is often forgotten by many starting/pro photographers. So I think this blogpost will be a very interesting read for many.

 

Back in the old days
First let me introduce myself. I own a commercial stock-site with Dutch images, I am picture editor and photographer.

 

Long, long time ago, before they invented digital photography, there was a profession that we called lithographer. Yes, I know I sound like an old man now, but this isn’t about the ancient times of Fred and Wilma, etching in stone tablets. This is about what you loose when your wonderful picture is sold and printed on paper. Not the beautiful paper they use for musea (we can only hope to reach that kind of exposure), but the paper they use for magazines or newspapers. Oh what a disappointment is waiting. Not only for us, the photographers, but also for our costumer! All these beautiful colors, looking like they’ve been using the wrong washing powder…

 

Back in the old days (here I go again ;-), there was a professional who translated the colors of your photo or your slide material into printing colors. The colors that are used by an old-fashioned slide had to be translated to the printing colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Nowadays (sorry) there is almost no lithographer left, nowadays we’ve got colour profiles!

 

Well, I’ll make things short. This means photographers are expected to deliver images that can be reproduced in printing colors. And photographers? They want color! The more, the better. Beautiful blue tones, a lot of saturation and even HDR images. Looking wonderful on the screen, sparkling, bright, and a selling argument!

 

Okay, let’s see what happens.
The first image is in RGB (made in Adobe RGB with the profile removed) and the second image is in CMYK (and set back to RGB to make viewing possible in your browser).

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