Photoshop "Rendering Intent"

[Brodie Geers]

Any recommendations on which Rendering Intent is typically best for Arch-Viz where things like brick color can be very important? I guess Perceptual or Relative probably but I've never seen anything concrete between the two.

 

-Brodie

[Jeff Mottle]

Except for Absolute Colorimetric, which is only used for simulating another device, there is no right or wrong rendering intent, and certainly no rendering intent that is specific to arch viz. Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual are the ones you use most often, but there are cases when the saturation rendering intent is of use too. It really depends on the device you are printing to and the colors in your image. Perceptual and Saturation rendering intents use gamut compression when converting color spaces, while Colorimetric rendering intents use gamut clipping. There are some really detailed explanations I've written about in this book in chapter 1: http://shop.cgarchitect.com/books-and-magazines/3ds-max-2010-architectural-visualization-advanced-to-expert.html There are a lot of other sites and books around that explain the technical differences between the 4 rendering intents to help you understand the differences and when to use them. If you just want a quick fix for now, I would select Relative Colorimetric as it maintains all of the in-gamut colors between the color spaces. If you have strong gradients though you can sometimes run into banding though, which is when Perceptual can sometimes help. If neither help, you'll need to manually fix the banding in Photoshop while proofing the device or converting the image to the final destination color space.