Piezography workflow incorporating Lightroom on Windows

InkjetMall Customer Support Piezography Inks & Printing
1

In one of his blogposts, Jon Cone explains how to incorporate Lightroom in piezography workflow. I’d like to validate my understanding of some of the things he wrote, particularly with respect to soft proofing in Lightroom on Windows.

As I understand it, I should be able to soft proof my image in Lightroom using an ICC profile that I have created using the Piezography calibration tools. My usual way of doing this is to create a virtual copy for soft proofing, leaving the master untouched. I apply corrections to the proof copy until it looks the way I want it to look when printed.

Then export the proof copy from Lightroom as a tif, selecting Adobe RGB as the color space.

Open the tif in Photoshop and change size to actual print size and the resolution to 720 ppi. Since I am making negatives for piezoDN, I would also flip horizontal and extend the canvas out to the page size with black as the extension color. I can either leave the color space as AdobeRGB or convert to Grayscale 16 bit Gamma 2.2. Then re-save the tif.

Open tif in QTRGui and print.

Is that about right?

2

I actually don’t think this article applies to your workflow (in fact I think it’s flawed). You can’t turn “preserve RGB values” on when soft-proofing in Lightroom. Therefore, you can’t simulate the linear (no color management) printing out of qtrGUI on Windows. You need to softproof and work in Photoshop.

-Walker

3

OK, Photoshop with Preserve Numbers is the only way to soft proof on Windows. But if I had a Mac, could I soft proof in Lightroom, then print from Print-Tool using the same output profile?

4

Yes. If you soft-proof with the output profile in LR and also print with the output profile (perceptual intent) it will work.

best,
Walker