Thursday, December 9, 2010

Lightroom is limited on color management

Adobe's Lightroom is really great. I now use LR for my 97% of time processing and printing photos. (The remaining 2% time uses Photoshop and 1% uses Silverfast).

However, LR is limited on color management and many times it causes annoying inconvenience:

(1) No soft proofing in LR's print module. For critical printing work, one has to open the file in Photoshop for soft proofing. My 16-bit color images scanned from 8x10 film are 1.5 GB and opening them in both LR and PS can be really slow, if not crashing my computer.

(2) The rendering color profile used in LR's Develop module is ProPhoto RGB but in Library and Print module it is Adobe RGB (1998). Because of this, I have seen some color inconsistency when the image is seen at different LR modules. For example, some deep reds cannot be shown in Adobe RGB color space.

I guess Adobe does not want LR to reduce too much users from PS so they purposely make the LR imperfect... sigh.