Monitors

[rickhearne]

My Apple Thunderbolt monitor does not seem to give me the colors that print, in Martin Evening's Adobe CS6 book he recommends the NEC 3090, any ideas? Thanks, Rick

 

[DorkSterr]

Anything from NEC is guaranteed to be a success.

 

[MLeeK]

back up a few steps first...
1. are you calibrating your monitor using a calibrator and software?
2. is you CS6 set to be working in sRGB or are you converting to sRGB?

 

[rickhearne]

I have the Adobe RGB (1998) as the color workspace setting, I have not calibrated, will the Apple monitor be comparable to th NEC after calibrating? Thanks, Rick

 

[Garbz]

Ok why do you have AdobeRGB as the working space firstly. Do you print your photos with an expensive process? Do you have a monitor with a wide colour gamut? What is it you're hoping to achieve?
In what way are you not getting the colours? Are they wrong? Dull? Do they look too blue or orange?
What Apple Thunderbolt monitor do you have? Thunderbolt is an I/O connection. It's like saying you have a USB mouse or a HDMI TV.

 

[MLeeK]

I have the Adobe RGB (1998) as the color workspace setting, I have not calibrated, will the Apple monitor be comparable to th NEC after calibrating? Thanks, Rick

That is your problem right there. You need to be in sRGB when you print. Whether you work in sRGB or adobe is up to you. I, personally see no point in even working in the large gamut as you can't see it anyway and then you have to be careful of clipping when you convert. Everything from Adobe Camera Raw forward works in sRGB for me. If you print in Adobe you will find that everything is very flat and washed out looking-even if you are calibrated.

Yes, you have to calibrate. Working on ANY uncalibrated monitor will produce crap results. It's like driving with a blindfold on. You have no clue what your doing. ALL monitors, even NEC monitors are set up for being very bright and contrasty. You will think your images are much brighter and have more "pop" to them than they do. They also tend to err to the side of cool

 

[KmH]

At output use the print color space the print lab wants Edit > Convert To profile. Some labs have printing machines and RIP software that can handle the wider gamut of Adobe RGB, though Adobe RGB is most often used to editing images that are destined for conversion to CMYK.
Martin advocates using the ProPhoto RGB color space for editing images destined for final output as a print.

Unfortunately, in the CS 6 version of Martin's book, the Color Management section was deemed not necessary since nothing had changed, and they figured a lot of the CS 6 readers would have one of Martin's 6 previous books that contain the same information. (The Web Output section was also left out of the CS 6 version of the book.)

 

[Garbz]

That is your problem right there. You need to be in sRGB when you print.

No you don't.

I, personally see no point in even working in the large gamut

Is that because you don't print images or know how to print?


To clarify if you print your own images colour conversion happens in one of two ways. Either your working colour space is sent to the printer driver via some API in the operating system (In windows it's done with ICS) and the printer driver then uses that incoming profile along with a combination of quality and paper settings chosen to convert the colours. The other option is that you disable all colour management in the printer driver and let the program manage the colour settings. In Photoshop this is done by ticking "Photoshop manages colours" and then selecting the appropriate colour space to suit the printer settings and paper either from one you generated yourself or by downloading the icc files from the manufacturer website.

Also even cheap printers have colours that fall outside the coverage of the sRGB gamut. Expensive 6+ colour printers even more so. This is to do with the differences in creating colours through mixing of CMYK and RGB. Your monitor and the sRGB space is quite bad at reproducing cyans.

 

[MLeeK]

That is your problem right there. You need to be in sRGB when you print.

No you don't.

I, personally see no point in even working in the large gamut

Is that because you don't print images or know how to print?


To clarify if you print your own images colour conversion happens in one of two ways. Either your working colour space is sent to the printer driver via some API in the operating system (In windows it's done with ICS) and the printer driver then uses that incoming profile along with a combination of quality and paper settings chosen to convert the colours. The other option is that you disable all colour management in the printer driver and let the program manage the colour settings. In Photoshop this is done by ticking "Photoshop manages colours" and then selecting the appropriate colour space to suit the printer settings and paper either from one you generated yourself or by downloading the icc files from the manufacturer website.

Also even cheap printers have colours that fall outside the coverage of the sRGB gamut. Expensive 6+ colour printers even more so. This is to do with the differences in creating colours through mixing of CMYK and RGB. Your monitor and the sRGB space is quite bad at reproducing cyans.

I have no clue how to print quality on a cheap home printer. No way in hell. That's why I leave it to the lab-and they require I use sRGB.

 

[Garbz]

Yep can't agree more there. It's sad how many labs out there have printers that can print outside the sRGB gamut yet still request that type of file. Your basic Fuji Frontier minilab at a chemist will produce richer greens than sRGB can record.