Print vs. Screen images

[davebmck]

I haven't done a lot of printing of my digital images so I don't have a lot of experience in this area. I am talking about matching the printed colors and brightness to the screen images.

In prints I have made on my HP printer, the colors seem a bit "muddier" than the screen image. I just had an online printer print sample prints for me and I am getting pretty much the same result. The printed images seem muddier, not as bright as the screen images, and the whites are not as white. The prints look great, just somewhat different than my screen images.

I have calibrated my monitor with a Spyder3pro calibrator, the color temperature of the monitor is set to 6500 and the gamma is 2.2. I have tried adjusting the brightness of the screen as well. On the screen images, I have tried adjusting the exposure and white balance, but nothing I do matches the print images.

Do others have similar results? Is this just the difference in viewing a backlit LCD vs a print that uses reflected light, or is is due the the difference in gamut between RGB and the printer color space? Or is there some other setting I am missing?

 

[Overread]

I am not certain, but cannot you forward your calibration data to your online printing company of choice? They might be able to do more to a print with that information

 

[davebmck]

They suggest color temperature of 6500 and gamma of 2.2, which I am using. Do you mean the actual ICC profile for the motor after calibration? Where do you find that anyway?

 

[PNA]

I had the same problem until I realized that my color spaces were not compatible; camera, monitor, printer driver setup and scanner. I have everything set to Adobe RGB (1998). Hope this helps

 

[davebmck]

I have all set to Adobe RGB (1998). The online printer requires you to save the file with the inbedded color space.

 

[PNA]

I have all set to Adobe RGB (1998). The online printer requires you to save the file with the inbedded color space.

Are you printing through Photoshop???

 

[davebmck]

Yes, when I print at home I print through Photoshop. I set up for Application Manages Colorspace (or something similar to that). I'm not sure what the professional online printer is using.

 

[PNA]

In cs2.....open "print with preview"; color management: Adobe RGB 1998;" let photoshop determine colors".

These settings work for me..............good luck.

 

[davebmck]

I will try tomorrow night. Thanks.

 

[davebmck]

OK, I did some reading today and found one of my problems. I was viewing my photos with lighting that was a color temperature of 3000. I found a day light florescent rated at 5500K and that made a big difference. Now if I open the picture in camera raw and adjust the color temperature from 5500 to about 6500-6900 and give it a little saturation, the screen matches pretty close to the print I got from the online source. The one I printed on my HP C8150 has more of a reddish cast to it. Does this mean I should adjust my monitor color temperature setting and recalibrate?

 

[PNA]

Pass......

 

[Garbz]

No it means if you are going to be hardproofing you need to buy a dedicated light box to do so.

Colour temperature means nothing individually because your eyes adjust to them. Don't believe me, dim the lights and turn the red channel all the way down. Use your computer for half an hour and then look at a white sheet of paper and observe how green it is.

You need to match your lighting to the monitor. Doing it the other way is a recepie for poor colour management if you have an LCD monitor as you would need to compress some colour channels unless you have a nice screen with an internal colour lookup table.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.shtml
Somewhere on the luminous landscape was an article on hardproofing and colour management but I can't find it. The soft proofing article is a step in the right direction though.

 

[davebmck]

I absolutely agree that color temperature doesn't matter much when just viewing the prints. They look great on there own and all the people who have looked at them remark about how good they look. The difference is only obvious when you do a direct comparison between the print and the image on the screen.

I don't really plan to get into hard proofing. I'm trying to resolve this because I have had less than perfect results with my own printing and was trying out an online print shop to get better results. The print shop had me send in 5 8x10 prints which they printed free for me to check my monitor calibration. When I made the comparison, I immediately noticed the difference.

I'm not a color perfectionist, I am just trying to determine if I am properly calibrated. If the answer is to view the prints at the same color temperature as the screen, then I am pretty close to being there.

It does seem to be a dilemma that we are supposed to calibrate our monitors to 6500K, adjust our images in that environment, and then practically nobody in the real world will view our prints in light at that color temperature.

 

[davebmck]

I've been doing some experimenting this afternoon. I notice that even when viewing the prints in good light there is a color difference between my screen image and the prints, so I tried some different setting while printing with my HP 5180.

When I use a printer profile named HP PS C6100-C8100 Prem Plus Photo, I get a good color match to the prints I got from the online print shop, but not as good a match to my monitor. For instance, one of my photos has some reddish rocks and gravel. The prints are more brownish in color. Now when I change my printer profile to Working RGB - Adobe RGB (1998) the prints match my monitor almost perfectly.

I find it hard to believe this is just the difference in gamut. I know the printer gamuts are narrower than RGB, but surely they can represent colors more accurately than that. Anybody know what is going on here?

BTW I don't see this color shift with I use the HP PS C6100-C8100 Prem Plus Photo profile in soft proofing.

 

[Garbz]

practically nobody in the real world will view our prints in light at that color temperature.

Unless they are outside in the sun

Have a read of this here: http://www.photoshopforphotographers.com/pscs2/download/PSCS2_colmanage.pdf Ignore the bits on profiling I imagine you don't have the hardware for this yet. I think you may be making a mistake in the process somewhere. For one when you let photoshop determine the colours for printing, are you setting them up the same way you setup the softproof, AND are you totally disabling colour management in the printer driver?