Black Point Compensation (BPC) applied twice to an image = shadow or colour issues?

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 2, 2025
3 replies
703 views

Hi, Ive had conflicting advice from Adobe agents and I was hoping someone could confirm what happens in this situation: if Black Point Compensation (BPC) is applied twice to an image you could have shadow or colour issues?

Circumstances could be: export image from LR into a jpg (which applies BPC) and then you send it off to a professional print service who then use BPC in their print software.

Another example could be: Doing a colour conversion in PS (which applies BPC) and then you print with "PS manages colors" and "BPC" enabled. Note: soft-proofing can give BPC but it is only temporary for the preview, not baked into the image file, I believe.

Thanks

Correct answer D Fosse

BPC can't be "applied twice". It rolls off any clipping if the black point is higher in the destination. If there isn't clipping, it doesn't do anything.

Again, are you seeing any specific problems?

davescm

Community Expert

Black point compensation is designed to avoid clipping of near black values. In your example of moving from a large document space to a smaller document space, then to an even smaller print space, leaving black compensation off at either conversion will result in near black values being clipped and, once clipped, they cannot be recovered in a later conversion.

Dave

D Fosse

Community Expert

Right. BPC should in practice always be on.

Do you experience black clipping, or lifted blacks, somewhere? Then there are other reasons for it.

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

In almost all situations, you would want to enable BPC when using Relative Colorimetric rendering intent, especially when going from an RGB working/editing space to a printer profile. If using non-Adobe software that doesn't offer BPC, I would then use Perceptual rendering over Relative Colorimetric if there was any concern of losing shadow detail. In some very rare non-photographic situations which are very image specific, one may prefer to go from CMYK to RGB using Relative Colorimetric without BPC, however, this would be very rare. BPC generally helps more than it hurts, which is why it's there.

H

HmmokthenAuthor

Inspiring

thanks for the reply. So, you've never had any shadow or color issues when BPC has been applied twice in your workflow?

D Fosse

Correct answer

Community Expert

BPC can't be "applied twice". It rolls off any clipping if the black point is higher in the destination. If there isn't clipping, it doesn't do anything.

Again, are you seeing any specific problems?

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