1. Calibrate your screen with your new colorimeter. Try for a luminance of 100-120 candelas per meter squared (cd/m2) and and 6500Kelvin (K) white point. If you can't get the screen down that far in luminance, you can calibrate it brighter and then raise the overall room lighting to compensate. The ratio of ambient room light to the brightness of the monitor is what gives you the overall perception on screen.
2. Buy a good viewing light like a Solux (www.solux.net) to view your prints with. They have a very affordable and accurate clamp-on light that works great. The color temperature is about 4800 Kelvin, which is close enough to the daylight 5000 K standard to work very well. The big advantage of the Solux is that it's a full spectrum light and is much better than any fluorescent for print viewing.
3. When you're printing, you have to choose the correct paper profile for your printer/paper combination. That paper profile is the translation from your working color space to the printer space, but since you're viewing on screen through the monitor profile, that profile is equally important.
When everything is working well, your prints, when viewed with a light like a Solux, should look very close to what you see on screen. If they don't, it has to be one of four things - the monitor calibration and profile is less than perfect, the paper profile is less than perfect (very likely), the monitor luminance is too high or too low, or the print viewing conditions don't match the profile's expectation.
You're attacking the biggest problem right now. The others will fall in line, but are important as well, particularly the paper profiles for your printer.
In addition, there some some very specific considerations if you happen to be printing from a Mac. Apple, Epson and Adobe seem to have conspired to make things as complicated and mysterious as possible recently, but let's not get into that area until absolutely necessary.
Peter, this is great information and I appreciate the time taken to outline a path for me to follow in my quest to {hopefully} understand all this. However, there's one problem ... I don't print here. I use MPix labs to print my work, so hopefully this doesn't throw me in for another loop. My problem has been the way things look on my screen, and the way they come back. My last print of my wife came from WHCC.
Not too big of a thing to deal with. Just takes a bit more time and some testing. You can see your own inkjet test results in minutes. You've just got to wait a few days for MPix.
In that case, what I would do is, after you have done a new calibration, I would send them a file to print, and maybe make part of it from a known image like the PhotoDisc test file or another file like that. I use that image with several of my own known images plus gray steps that show both on screen and in print separation of critical highlight and shadow detail. It's normal on almost every printer to lose everything below about 10,10,10 or so to dead black, but most good printers can show you the difference between 253 and 255, just barely.
Ideally, your newly calibrated screen should be able to show you all the steps between 0 and 255 - if you're in a darkened room and have no visual distractions. Ideally, that is, as only the best of the best monitors can actually deliver that kind of detailed performance. It's more important to be able to see everything at the highlight end anyway. You can construct your own neutral step wedges to judge what your screen is showing you and include those in a test image. I like to label each step with the RGB value, just to remind myself where the limits are.
Thank you Peter. A tad to technical for me, but I'll venture this weekend as my calibration device will arrive on Friday. I have an Apple iMac, so I'm not sure if that's a bad or good thing. I'm also afraid I may make things worse as I was told (can't remember by who) that Mac monitors are calibrated from factory. My issue seems to be the brightness of the images. I recently ordered a few prints from WHCC of my wife during her birthday. In fact, this image to be exact: http://jjh.pbase.com/o6/88/335988/1/139911056.VQfWH3No.FILE0013.jpg
However, when I received it --- it was under-exposed and kinda dull looking (yes, I know the image is dull in the creative sense). Guess I'm trying to create a happy median where my prints (using Zenfolio who I believe prints using MPix) will come back looking close to what I see on my screen.
I just wish I could get a basic grip on all this (at an entry level) building a solid foundation I can grow and learn from. Maybe that way I won't be spending so much money trying to find the answers and solutions. :-(
Well, I received my ColorMunki Display unit and calibrating the monitor was quite simple. All I had to do was follow the prompts displayed on my iMac 24. What I noticed right away is it made my monitor darker, but I suppose that's OK because brighter (as it was before) was causing me to stop-down my images which in turn would yield dark/muddy looking prints from my lab (WHCC).
Am I digesting this correctly when I say if my monitor is darker, then my images won't look so under exposed when I stop down on the computer only to discover a low exposed image at print?
Additionally, this device recommends it remain plugged in to the USB port so it can monitor ambient lighting (I have it set to do so every 30 min). There's also an internal (bluish/white) light on it (can be seen from a slit on the side) which is glowing slowly about every 5-8 seconds or so.
Yes, if your monitor is darker, it will be a closer visual match to your prints and will allow you to make more accurate edits. Ideally, you would like to have the perceived "brightness" of the monitor and prints to be same, or nearly so. It looks like you took a big step towards approaching that goal.
what you're trying to match is the brightness of the print *UNDER NORMAL VIEWING CONDITIONS* to the screen. If the screen is too bright, it'll make you believe the print is too dark. get a couple of good test images, try recalibrating the monitor to a couple of different luminance levels and see how they match but make sure that you have to momentarily look away from the print to the monitor (ie. do not put the print up next to the monitor so they are both in your field of view simultaneously). For many people the oft-recommended level of 120 cd/m2 is on the high side (I calibrate my stuff to 90)
dortizphoto wrote:
Am I digesting this correctly when I say if my monitor is darker, then my images won't look so under exposed when I stop down on the computer only to discover a low exposed image at print?
Dave
Here are the bigger picture concepts to grasp:
1) You can't change printer /paper contrast and gamut characteristics so you need to calibrate the brightness of the monitor to simulate the appearance of the print if you want to use screen to predict print results in soft proofing mode.
2) The room lighting where you compare print to screen is a critical variable affecting your perception of the match between print and screen.
3) I think it is more important that the print be evaluated in the lighting conditions where it will be displayed as your end goal rather than the goal being screen > print match in your computer room. That's not to say a close screen > print match in the computer room isn't important or desirable starting baseline for process control, only that what matters more is how the print looks where is it hung on the wall in that room's ambient lighting conditions. The same print hung in dimly lit and brightly lit spaces will look different due to the way the perception of the viewer's eye sight will adjust to the overall brightness level of the room and the light coming off the wall surrounding the photograph.
Dave - I actually like this image of your wife quite a bit. There's something about it that feels like a frame from a movie and there's a story there but you don't know exactly what it is yet. The image isn't perfect but it's got emotion, and that works for me.
I'm at home right now and have looked at your image on two separate MacBook's, which aren't the same caliber as my Sony Artisan's at my studio, but they're in the ballpark. The shot looks pretty good and only slightly different on the two different laptops.
There are a couple of options at this point if you prints are coming back dark from mPix. One is that your screen is still too bright, although what you've posted seems pretty normal, or perhaps the mPix profile that they're using internally is not great.
One thing to do would be to try a print from the same file somewhere else that has a known standard of calibration and profiling. And in fact, I'll even offer to make you an Epson 9900 print on a satin photo paper and send it to you. That would help you troubleshoot where the problem is coming from. It can be a bitch tracking down printing issues and not having a known reference can only make it more difficult. At the same time, you could print a known test file available online that has been independently verified to be of correct brightness. Both could go a long way to easing your frustrations.
