Lighthouse Sunrise

phogan2292 · Jan 25, 2017

Hi all,

First time posting in a while (over a year I think!). I made this photo up at Split Rock State Park near Two Harbors, MN this past fall.

I've gotten it printed already, and the cliffs/shadows on the print ended up much darker than what I'm seeing on my screen. Does anybody else think they look underexposed?

C&C welcome!

Thanks,
Paul

SquarePeg · Jan 25, 2017

I can see a little detail but overall pretty dark. Do you use a calibrated monitor when you edit?

Krell0 · Jan 25, 2017

I would say underexposed

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Derrel · Jan 25, 2017

Krell7 said:
I would say underexposed

Yes, it does look somewhat underexposed, and the saturation of the colors in the water and sky seems a bit too low. It's not too surprising that this printed a bit too dark. I read an article some years ago that said searches on the string "Prints come out too dark" returned like, 3 million hits...it is a big, common issue. Setting the black point of an image like this will help ensure against too much "ink-down" in the darker areas. Something in the 13 to 22 area for the darker tones would likely be about the 'darkest' I would go for this type of shot.

I really like the way you caught the wave hitting that rouck outcropping in the lower right-- that little bit of action really adds a lot to this shot!

crimbfighter · Jan 26, 2017

Soft proofing may help, too. The dynamic range and color capabilities of your camera and monitor may very well exceed the printers capabilites. As a result, any out of gamut colors or tones may just end up extra dark, essentially clipping the shadows.

phogan2292 · Jan 27, 2017

Thank you all for the comments! I edited this with my laptop screen, which seemed fairly close to the coloring as printed though. I would be interested to run through a calibration though. I have another monitor that I've used in the past, but it has worse color than my laptop at the moment.

crimbfighter said:
Soft proofing

Is this just leaving some extra space on the histogram while I edit, assuming that the far upper and far lower ranges will be cut by the printing?

crimbfighter · Jan 28, 2017

phogan2292 said:
Thank you all for the comments! I edited this with my laptop screen, which seemed fairly close to the coloring as printed though. I would be interested to run through a calibration though. I have another monitor that I've used in the past, but it has worse color than my laptop at the moment.

crimbfighter said:

Soft proofing

Click to expand...

Is this just leaving some extra space on the histogram while I edit, assuming that the far upper and far lower ranges will be cut by the printing?

No, soft proofing is a process by which you simulate the specific paper/ink/printer combo in the program. In LR for example, you activate the soft proof feature and select the paper/ink combo it will be printed on, also known as the ICC profile, and the program limits the colors and tonal range of the editing window to match what the print will look like. You can then edit your digital image to optimize it for print. Do a simple search on YouTube for soft proofing in your desired PP program and you will get many tutorials to watch.

However, since you mentioned you don't have a calibrated monitor, I would suggest you do that before anything. Calibrating not only adjusts color, but equally important, it adjusts the brightness of the monitor which is extremely important for the proper representation of shadows and highlights. If you don't invest in calibrating your monitor, you will forever be frustrated with the way your prints and jpegs don't match what you saw in your PP software.