Color Management?

[Brian L]

Hello everyone!

Alright so I'm sure this has been brought up before but am having the hardest time finding info about it.

My questions are where to start with it? All the questions too. My photos look great on the monitor but are a little darker once printed. My photos look great on the monitor but are a little lighter once printed. lol do you guys get the idea. lol. So If someone could give me some good starting points on where to start and help me get a grip on this. I have been calibrating and seemed to help quite a bit. However would also like to know some more things bout color management. Thanks everyone.

 

[musicaleCA]

Er, well...Calibrate your monitor. Pay attention to colourspaces and gamuts. Search this forum for all of Garbz's posts; he's an expert when it comes to colour.

The issue of images being darker or lighter when printed isn't a colour management issue. It has to do with the luminosity of your screen. Generally, editing on an LCD display risks the final image being too dark, because even when an LCD is at its darkest, it's still very bright. Brighter than a sheet of paper, really. The opposite is true for CRTs, which tend to trick us into brightening the image too much. This is something that hard proofs can help fix, and very strict control of your editing environment and display can help to reduce or eliminate the issue. That, and trusting your histogram more and your eyes a little less (though even then I've had plenty of images look right on my monitor, seem right in the histo, and print kinda dark; bah).

Seriously, search Garbz's posts. You'll learn a lot.

 

[Big Mike]

Yes, the first step is to calibrate your monitor...and to do it properly, you really need a hardware device.

 

[Garbz]

After calibration you still need to soft-proof. Here's a good guide: http://homepage.mac.com/ilyons/pdf/ps6_sp.pdf

Then to get perfect results compared to the screen you need to calibrate your viewing conditions. This means buying a very expensive lightbox and turning the white balance to your screen. Not that any normal photographer really bothers with this step, but it's the only way to match the screen to the print properly.

If there's still a difference then your printer is stuffed, or the person printing your image is stuffed.

 

[Brian L]

Cool. alright guys thanks for the info. I will follow the steps. I have starting points now. before I didn't know why things were going the way they were.

Once again thanks for the help.

 

[Andrew Boyd]

The best monitor calibration device for the money is the Eye1 Display2 device. This is a great tool which will set one monitor or a dozen monitors to the same specs. Fantastic.
This is the starting point for color management. If you're serious about your printing, you simply can't afford to skimp on this.

Andrew Boyd
TheDiscerningPhotographer.com

 

[musicaleCA]

Wait a minute. Why would you set the same colour profile to multiple monitors? They're all going to have varying degrees of colour shift over time.

 

[Garbz]

Which is exactly why many programs prompt you to re-calibrate every 2 weeks.
He didn't say set the same profile to multiple monitors he said set the monitors to the same specs, each will have their own profile

 

[musicaleCA]

Oops. My bad. Mis-read. >.<