Help with installing 3rd party icc profiles into Windows 10 Color Mgt

flycaster · 18 Feb 2016

Windows 10, Dell U2312HM.
I am having trouble placing two downloaded icc profiles into Windows Color Management. These are the profiles used by Costco in my neighborhood. I have successfully downloaded to my Download folder two icc profiles from Dry Creek (Florida digital photo lab profiles) that I intend to use on my monitor. However, when I tried to add these two downloaded into Color management, I got the following alert message: "Windows failed to associate the profile *.icc with the service "Display 1. Dell U2312HM (Digital-DV) - Intel (R) HD Graphics 530." The printer name is invalid.

philc43 · 18 Feb 2016

Hello :)

The colour profiles for displays need to be .icm files. The colour profiles for printers are .icc files. You seem to have downloaded printer files not display/monitor calibration files.

Added later...
Actually it turns out the .icc and .icm are just a relic from the Apple and Windows differences in nomenclature. Both should be recognised although it is sometimes worth changing the file ext. if they do not load.

flycaster · 18 Feb 2016

philc43 said:

Hello :)

The colour profiles for displays need to be .icm files. The colour profiles for printers are .icc files. You seem to have downloaded printer files not display/monitor calibration files.

Hi Phil, are you sure about that as here's one of the files I downloaded - - Costco-FL-Lantana-Lus.icc. When I use my colorMunki Display to calibrate my monitor, the files are all icc. And, when looking at the profiles within Windows 10 Color Management, the files are also icc??? Could it be that icm files are for printers.

philc43 · 18 Feb 2016

Well I was going by the files on my monitor and printer which are consistent with what I said in my post. However, a quick bit of research reveals that the .icm files originate from Windows and the .icc files originate from Apple but they should both work.

Try changing your suffix from .icc to .icm on those files and see if this makes them work. This was suggested on one of the websites.

Now changed my earlier post to reflect this.

no1yak · 18 Feb 2016

Theses profiles are print paper profiles that you would use if you are going to send your photo images to be printed.
When you use your colormunki for monitor profiling that is a totally different profile (colour Gamut ). What post processing software are you using?-if any. Going back to your monitor, the profile from your colormunki is the one that should be in Windows colour management.

Help with installing 3rd party icc profiles into Windows 10 Color Mgt-capture.jpg

philc43 · 18 Feb 2016

I think no1yak has the answer, the profiles you were trying to use are for printers therefore they would not be of any use for a monitor and that would be why it was rejected.

AndreyT · 18 Feb 2016

Regardless of the file extension (.icc or .icm, which means nothing) the profiles one gets from Costco are apparently profiles of their printers (or, more precisely, of their printer-ink-paper combination). Trying to associate these profiles with the monitor makes no sense. That is exactly what Windows is telling you.

The only use for such profile would be to use it for Soft Proofing in software that supports soft proofing functionality. Other than that I don't understand why anyone would even want to download a profile for a printer they don't have.

A web search comes up with a bunch of guides that say that one is supposed to assign Costco color profiles to their pictures before sending them off to Costco for printing (like, using "Assign Profile" feature in Photoshop). This kind of bizarre usage defies all sense and logic. Why would anyone want to do that? Is this kind of "flow" suggested by Costco itself?

flycaster · 18 Feb 2016

OK, Andrey and no1yak, you guys are showing me that you know more than I do about this issue...and that is very good. So, in nutshell here's what I'm trying to do: After post-processing on Faststone, I want to be sure (as would be possible) that when the images are put onto paper, the printed image (from a Walmart, Costco, etc photocenter) and my monitor image should agree as much as possible. How can I do this given my present resources?

AndreyT · 18 Feb 2016

In order to achieve the best match possible you need the following

1. Calibrate and profile your monitor.

For that you have your ColorMunki. ColorMunki profiling software will generate a monitor profile for your monitor. This profile should be assigned as your default monitor profile in Windows. It is quite possible that after generating the profile ColorMunki software will do this assignment for you. If not, you can easily do it in Windows color management settings.

Note that this step does not in any way involve Costco and their profiles. This is entirely between you, ColorMunki and your monitor.

2. Use color-management-aware software to adjust your photos on your monitor to make your photos look the way you want them to look. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Corel PaintShopPro, Corel Paint - all will do. I assume Faststone image viewer/editor is also color-management-aware.

3. Use calibrated and profiled printing service. Now, I never used Costco myself, so I don't know how it really works with them. But typically there are two possibilities:

3.1. Printing service uses "smart" color-management-aware software and printers to print images.

In this case you don't have to do anything at all. Just send them your files after making all desired adjustments, and they will reproduce them on paper as faithfully (as close to the original) as possible. All color-reproduction related adjustments will be done by the printing service internally.

3.2. Printing service uses "dumb" machines and software to print images. They don't perform color-reproduction related adjustments.

Now, this is not necessarily the end of the world. Printing service that uses "dumb" machines might still decide to profile their "dumb" machines and make the resultant color profiles available to the public. You are supposed to download that color profile. And you are supposed to convert your image files to that color profile before sending them to printing service. Profile conversion is available in Adobe Photoshop through "Convert to profile" command. I expect that Faststone also has this capability.

Note, that this latter procedure will modify your images. You should make copies of all your images and apply this conversion to the copies. It is these converted copies that you'll send to printing service. It is possible that these converted images might look "strange" on your monitor and their color reproduction might look wrong to your eye. This is OK. The whole idea of these conversion is to "distort" your color in that specific way that will precisely cancel out distortions introduced later by the printing machine. If the color profile distributed by the printing service is good (properly describes the machine), then this technique will let you to obtain correctly colored images from "dumb" machine.

3.3. Printing service invented a third, alternative, unorthodox way to handle color management.

So, judging by the fact that Costco distributes their color profiles, I'd guess that they expect you to follow procedure 3.2. But I could be wrong, since as I said above I never used Costco myself.

no1yak · 19 Feb 2016

It appears that the paper profiles you have downloaded are for printing the images yourself. Most colour labs either use SRGB or ADOBE RGB. I would Imagen that Cosco would use SRGB (never use labs myself do all my own printing) If your post processing software is colour managed then you need to set the colour space to SRGB once you have edited your images. There is a world of information on the web about how to colour manage for printing yourself or farming out to labs. Like AndreyT has said, profile your monitor first and make sure that profile is set in Windows. The best approach would be to phone Cosco and ask them what colour space they require - SRGB or ADOBE RGB. Once you know for sure then apply that colour space to your images. Hope this helps.