from screen to print
livinginoz
Registered Users Posts: 497 Major grins
i sometimes need help in translating my images from what i see on the screen to what comes out of my printer. hope you can help. here's an example:
i posted this in the nature thread, and someone mentioned it looks a little blue. on my monitor, it looks great, yet when i print it on my printer, an epson photo r200, it definitely does have a blue tone overall. my computer is a brand new imac g5 with a 20" monitor, flat screen. i assumed it came calibrated, though it could need adjustment. so, several questions come to mind.
1. does anyone have a suggestion for calibration if needed?
2. is it a printer problem or a monitor problem?
3. if it looks fine on the screen, but prints blue, should i make adjustments in photoshop or in the settings on the printer? i know there are settings to change curves in the printer setup, but i am never quite sure how they work. i suppose i could just keeping trying and printing until i get what i want.
4. would i have the same result if i sent it to a professional processor for printing?
what do any of you who print your work do? i am planning on printing some images for note cards to be consigned in local stores and galleries. a lot of my images i manipulate to look like art prints, but some i prefer as just photos.
thanks for any answers you might have.
i posted this in the nature thread, and someone mentioned it looks a little blue. on my monitor, it looks great, yet when i print it on my printer, an epson photo r200, it definitely does have a blue tone overall. my computer is a brand new imac g5 with a 20" monitor, flat screen. i assumed it came calibrated, though it could need adjustment. so, several questions come to mind.
1. does anyone have a suggestion for calibration if needed?
2. is it a printer problem or a monitor problem?
3. if it looks fine on the screen, but prints blue, should i make adjustments in photoshop or in the settings on the printer? i know there are settings to change curves in the printer setup, but i am never quite sure how they work. i suppose i could just keeping trying and printing until i get what i want.
4. would i have the same result if i sent it to a professional processor for printing?
what do any of you who print your work do? i am planning on printing some images for note cards to be consigned in local stores and galleries. a lot of my images i manipulate to look like art prints, but some i prefer as just photos.
thanks for any answers you might have.
0
Comments
1. does anyone have a suggestion for calibration if needed?
Yes try a Monaco, or other brand hardware / software calibration system.
2. is it a printer problem or a monitor problem?
Yes
3. if it looks fine on the screen, but prints blue, should i make adjustments in photoshop or in the settings on the printer? i know there are settings to change curves in the printer setup, but i am never quite sure how they work. i suppose i could just keeping trying and printing until i get what i want.
Welcome to the world of color management. First you need to use a calibrated monitor, other wise you will be attempting to match the color of apples with the color of oranges. I don't have the ability to explain ICC profiles, :cry , but maybe some one can post a few links to info on this.
Once you have the monitor calibrated, use the correct ICC profile for the paper your using to soft proof the photo. Make any final adjustments needed based on this. When printing let PhotoShop determin the colors. TURN OFF ALL/ANY color management in the printer!
You only want one device to color managing the document.
4. would i have the same result if i sent it to a professional processor for printing?
Yes
what do any of you who print your work do? i am planning on printing some images for note cards to be consigned in local stores and galleries. a lot of my images i manipulate to look like art prints, but some i prefer as just photos.
I have spent both time and money (I purchased a Monaco calibration device), and learned as much as I could about the basics of color management. I can now pretty much get the print to match what I see on screen, but it did take awhile, and it is not 100% perfect.
I tried to take the blue cast out of your photo, and I will post it here for you to look at it on your monitor. While not perfect you should be able to see adifference.
If you think it would help you, send me an e-mail and I'll give you my phone number.
Good luck,
Sam
This is the best I could do with removing the cast.
Problems with colour calibration have probably given just about everybody here fits at one time or another. Colour calibration for monitors, RGB printers, press printers, is a full time job for some. You will find many threads here at dgrin regarding calibration.
First off, equipment doesn't really come calibrated. A new system should be pretty good right out of the box, but that is no guarantee.
So what to do:
1. I can't speak for the Mac version, but Adobe supplied a little utility called Adobe Gamma with Photoshop. It shows up in my control panel as Adobe Gamma. It's not a perfect calibration tool (as you have to eyeball certain settings) but it is a reasonable start. BTW, no matter how you calibrate your monitor, it can change over time. Flat panels should hold there calibration a good long time compared to CRT monitors which need to be calibrated more frequently as they get older (the calibration drifts). One of the most popular calibration tool companies is www.colorvision.com They have several products Spyder Spyder Pro, etc. that are designed to calibrate flat panel monitors, printers, etc.
Just having your monitor calibrated does not mean that your printing problems are over. The monitor calibration tools ensure that what comes out on the screen matches some predetermined colour settings and will then look identical on other properly calibrated screens. You can still have some variances when printing. That is why colorvision sells products to calibrate other devices like printers and scanners.
All this costs money. Some people here do enough printing that they have invested in calibrating their workflow. For me, I would like a better monitor calibration tool someday, but am satisfied with Adobe Gamma. When I take a photo into a commercial photo printing shop, I am almost always very satisified.
For printing at home, I also use an Epson Photo printer. I did have to play with some of the colour adjustments to get my prints to come out the way I want (this is something you can do in advanced properties). I now have some "standard" adjustments that I make when I print.
Please note that prints very often do not "match" what you see on the screen. On the screen, you combine colours with light, making the combined colour brighter than the two originals (Reg Green Blue). Printing is of course reflective light. You combine two colours to get a primary colour (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black) and the colour can be darker. So it is possible to have colours that are perfectly visible on the screen, but can't be printed (called out of Gamut). This can add to some of the differences.
2. Printer problem or monitor problem? Don't know. It could be both.
3. Get your monitor calibrated in some form or fashion. That needs to be done. Just to check, open a number of photos that have something that should be some level of white or grey in real life. Use the color sample tool and see what RGB values you get for that spot. If the spot is truly a neutral tone (some variation of black, grey or white), all three RGB values should be the same (or very, very close). This means something that should be white might have a value of 241, 241, 241. If you see something where the white value is for example 235,235,241, this shows that the Blue value is higher and it indicates a bit of a blue cast. Your monitor may appear fine to your eyes, but it will indeed print a bit blue.
4. Will you have the same result if you send it to a lab? Maybe/probably/don't know. Many photo labs do their own color correcting. People have been bringing back photos for years saying their pictures don't look right. So many places do their own automatic adjustments to help "correct" common color flaws. You generally have to ask to have no colour correction done during printing.
I hope this long answer has helped a bit. It's well worth spending some time with calibration. You have to decide how much time, effort, and money is worthwhile for you.
There are a number of local experts here at dgrin that will likely chime in about "fixing" your colour in this photo. Hang a around and I'm sure more answers will come your way.
Regards,
Brad
www.digismile.ca
http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-color
http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-color
http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone
http://www.smugmug.com/help/washed-out
I've been battling the same monster for some time but think I've got it tamed thanks to the fine folks here on Dgrin.
I highly suggest getting a calibration print from Smugmug and downloading the corresponding jpeg to do a comparison. A calibration tool like a Spyder is the next step. I'm expecting mine to arrive Jan 10th.
Your original horse pic does have a blue cast and looks better in the reply from Sam. I guess that tells me my monitor is fairly close to where it should be.
Good luck taming your beast!
sam, i could not really see the difference between your version of the horse and mine. however, the print i made today was very blue, so that is perhaps leading me to a need to calibrate or at the very least, adjust the printer.
i assume we are all talking RGB here. for a long time i tried to print in CMYK. hey, 4 colors in the print, 4 in the tank. i use CMYK for everything i have commercially printed at work, so i figured that would be the way to go. does that make a difference with a small home printer?
i am going to check out the links you all attached, too. i am getting quite a large file of them
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Check out SuperCal at http://www.bergdesign.com/
It comes highly recommended and you can try it out for free ($20 if you like it). I'd been using my internal OSX calibration program and thought I had things under control pretty much, but I went through all the steps with SuperCal and things seemed to be much more out of whack than I would have expected. It's easy to use, and I definitely noticed a difference. (I'm running the same system as you).
For what it's worth, your horse, on my monitor, was clearly blue. In this case, I'd trust the printer.
I don't want to put down any of the higher end systems, but they are costly, and many shops get by just fine without them. A new monitor should be capable of being brought into line without much problem.
—Korzybski
will it be apparent how to do this? i am suddenly feeling like a rank beginnner again........
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