Toward the end of work on most paintings, I find myself slowly poring over each square inch at magnifications of 200% and 300%. None of the pixel by pixel fine work is visible in JPEGs you see in this illustration and other work in the Art section of this site; individual pixels do, however, show up with near-perfect clarity in originals.
I invariably do the final five or six iterations of paintings in Photoshop, which lets me access all my filters and gives me clean, dependable ways to measure and compare colors. It’s possible to run Photoshop filters in Painter, but the program handles memory so inefficiently I’ve found it easier to switch back and forth. I’ve defined the behavior of Photoshop’s information palette so I can always read CMYK color values whether I’m working in LAB, RGB, or CMYK color.
Years of color separation and prepress work, much of it antedating personal computers, have given me a visual feel for CMYK values that I’ve simply never troubled myself to develop for LAB and RGB values. My main monitor is tightly calibrated so what I see on screen will be at least very close to what the final production device produces. That’s not to say I never encounter color weirdities: merely that with considerable practice, I’ve taught myself which monitor colors aren’t actually achievable, which will turn out darker than they seem on screen, which lighter, and so forth. The primary limitation of working digitally is that what one sees isn’t necessarily what one’s going to get, and the less sophisticated the final production device, (non-Adobe PostScript ink jet printers, for example,) the more color and contrast and density surprises one encounters.