Colour Profiles

Big Ted

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Hi All
I wonder if someone could help me? Firstly please forgive me if this s a topic somewhere else on the site but i have just joined.

In a nutshell i am having a problem with the colours of prints I get back from various print companies and have got myself confused.
I have a Spyder3 monitor calibrator and use it quite easily enough but the image i see on the monitor is always different to what i get back from the printers. I use a pro print company by the way so it is something i am doing wrong.
The company tells me to send my images to them saved in the sRGB colour space which i think i am doing?
I use photoshop cs5 and Lightroom 3 for editing so can someone point me in the right direction so i can set up cs5 and lightroom correctly.
 
It's a problem of side by side comparisons. Your monitor is a self-illuminating sources. Your print is not. Your monitor will typically have a dynamic range quite different to that of a print. To accurately compare them side by side you need:

1. Monitor calibrated to a specific white balance, gamma curve, and with the brightness and black point values carefully clamped to a certain dynamic range not exceeding that of the print.

2. Room lighting that is dark enough not to contribute to any changes in colour balance of what you see on the screen.

3. A calibrated lightbox set to a brightness that compares with the monitor brightness and a white balance that is often set to the monitor - some adjustment value to compensate for the fact that inkjet paper is actually slightly blue in colour.


The poor mans version is set your monitor to around about 5000-5500 kelvin and stare at your picture for a little while. Then walk outside and have a look at your picture in the sunlight.

The most important part your calibrator does is make sure that your colours are consistent across the tone curve. So that light grey and dark grey are both neutral, so that your value of pure blue is a very specific blue. Beyond that, white balance and contrast are heavily dependant on the viewing conditions of the print.
 
CS5 is your real editor, let it manage colour by going >EDIT-PREFERENCES, then set your working space to srgb, set the camera to shoot this mode too if your not sure what your doing, if you have a wide gamut monitor set this to srgb too, then calibrate it.

A lot of PRO colour labs here use RGB rather than srgb, look up loxley colour online, they're the best I've used, in Glasgow, and colour is always spot on and being in this line for a while and hand printing colour darkroom for years my calibration was done by eye using adobe gamma. I think you may have RGB as your colour space in one or other program, this produces muted colour from prints in the srgb space. H
 
Thanks for the advice everyone. I have looked at the links to the websites and done my own research, what a minefield the topic is!!
Just about got it cracked now apart from the brightness. As silly as it sounds i think maybe that is caused by me looking at my monitor at a funny angle.
Anyway a new monitor is in the post somewhere on its way to me
 
Not silly at all. TN film panels change both in brightness and tone with viewing angles. That's why some of us spend $1000 on high end IPS LCDs from Eizo or NEC
 

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