getting colors right, canon pixma pro 9500

the supervillain

Hi everybody!
So I am fortunate enough to have gotten my paws on a pixma pro 9500
I am trying to get the prints to look like they do on my computer.
I know there is stuff to do with ICC profiles, color spaces etc. My concern is, how do I make them all work together?
I am shooting raw, in SRGB colorspace, should I be in adobeRGB, especially for printing??

Any tips or links would be great!!
thanks a lot

Miguel Delinquento

Have you calibrated your monitor with a hardware tool?
That's the first step.

M

the supervillain

I use a datacolor spyder 3 pro
I am trying to figure that one out as well, I had calibrated, then the software asked me to update, and it seems a little off. I think I need to uninstall/reinstall the application.

Miguel Delinquento

So, recalibrate. Try to have the calibration software target the display brightness around 110-120 cd2/m. That's a start.

Your printer is capable of printing within the aRGB gamut, but I would stay with sRGB as a less complicated starting point. Images saved to the web should be in that color space.

It would be worth doing serious homework about color management. I would think there is a tutorial or good links on the Dgrin site. The terminology can be confusing. Once your process works, everything photographic is so much better.


M

the supervillain wrote:

I use a datacolor spyder 3 pro
I am trying to figure that one out as well, I had calibrated, then the software asked me to update, and it seems a little off. I think I need to uninstall/reinstall the application.

the supervillain

should the calibration be any different on a laptop monitor??

thanks so much for your patience, its amazing to have this wonderful printer, then seeing the colors a bit off in the print was a little discouraging

Miguel Delinquento

You are welcome.
The calibration process will be the same, but the quality of a typical laptop display for photographic purposes is significantly lesser than a mid-range desktop monitor. My wife has new MacBook Pro with the matte screen--totally lovely to use--but it is still not close to my IPS working monitor I am typing this on.
Worth calibrating a laptop for sure, but keep your scope of use reasonable. I would recommend performing serious retouching and editing on the larger display.

Your printer will amaze you pretty soon. The reality is that digital photography is still in a sort of adolescent phase. We haven't standardized many processes and file formats (all RAW files are different for example), and the vocabulary is still being worked out, so consider yourself a bit of a pioneer here with this kludgy calibration and color management stuff. I would think that this will all be automated within 5 years or so.

M

the supervillain wrote:

should the calibration be any different on a laptop monitor??

thanks so much for your patience, its amazing to have this wonderful printer, then seeing the colors a bit off in the print was a little discouraging

the supervillain

well,
my laptop monitor is pretty good. I have a 256mb dedicated graphic card and the monitor is at a resolution of 1920x1200.

but the issue I think is that the datacolor software wants me to adjust the monitor settings on the monitor itself, but I do not have those options, I am only able to adjust them in the graphics card settings.

Hopefully I will be able to play around with this again tonight!
I will keep you posted.


I think I am going to have to look at ICC profiles as well, for the paper I am using. All this stuff is all new to me, you think you know a lot about photoshop and post processing, then you get this printer and you have to learn a whole slew of new things!
Kind of exciting