this is pretty rough....

[EandSphotography]

So, i'm still learning all my new gadgets i just recently purchased and im just not getting what i want out of it. Tonight, i was playing around with RAW files , which that doesnt seem to be too big of a deal. Got it figured out pretty quickly. I did some shots of some christmas ornaments on my tree and was playing around with the different white balance options and such. Got one picture of a snowman edited and saved and converted it to jpeg. Opened up photoshop and printed it from there and while it looks good on my screen, it is just coming out way darker on my printer. I understand that if the screen isnt properly calibrated that could be part of the issue, but this seems way off. I've tried changing printer settings in letting the printer handle color and also letting PSE handle color and while i could see a difference between the two ( printer handling color was more red) it didnt change the darkness between the screen and the printer. I am considering purchasing a seperate monitor and spyder3 to calibrate it and use that instead of my laptop but if it's not really going to be much better then i hate to drop more money into it. I'm beginning to think that it's not even worth trying to print at home and just bring it to a photo store to have whatever printed. But my concern about that is, if i edit the file and what it looks like on my computer isnt what it really is, then the print from a photo store probably wouldnt be much better i'm assuming.

I dont know honestly, i'm beginning to think this was just another bad choice of hobbies once again.

Oh, here's another thing... i'm not sure if this affects anything but from photoshop when i go to print i get a message saying
"Some postscript specific print settings(interpolation,calibration,encoding)will be ignored since you are printing to a non post-script printer".

Does this have any affect on printing photos? the printer i have is a canon pixma pro9000 mark II

Thanks,
Erik

 

[Overread]

I am considering purchasing a seperate monitor and spyder3 to calibrate it and use that instead of my laptop but if it's not really going to be much better then i hate to drop more money into it.

This is the best answer to your problems of calibration - the LCD screens are not as good as CRT and the laptop ones especially - even with very slight changes in viewing angle your brightness and contrast on the screen change and colour casts on the screen are often invisible to our eyes (since our eyes are subjective and will adjust to see what we think we should see more than the actual colour). The spyder devices are not subjective and so do work at calibrating a screen.
If you're going to go this rout I suggest investing in a good quality monitor - sadly CRT are mostly dead now so its LCD you have to look at nad a good one for colour calibration is going to cost you a fair bit. I can't recomend makes or models because its something I still have to do (once I get the money together)

As for printing if you have a calibrated and solid viewing setup you should have no trouble using an external printing lab, and often the costs of prints from there are far more affordable than buying quality printers and inks for home use (when often the cost of the ink alone is more than that of getting printer and ink in the shop).
One step I use is to print postcard sized images first - this really helps to nail the little errors in the shot (especailly since whites and blacks in print are far less lenient as they are on the screen - whites are more white and blacks more black so sometimes you have to adjust brightnesses of areas of the shot quite a bit to get the same effect in print I find).


Also make sure that when your working in elements that your working in the sRGB colourspace since it is the most most widly used colourspace.


Photography is an endless bottom of investment = welcome to the club :mrgreen:

 

[Invictus]

please dont give up

 

[keith foster]

I have a Canon Pixma pro 9000 similar to yours but I have 2 other combo printers. The problem is your monitor. I got this answer from another thread on this forum a couple weeks ago and it works. Turn the brightness of your laptop as low as it will go when you are getting ready to print. Now adjust the picture to what you want it to look like using either the printer settings or the software settings and now print. Your prints will be MUCH closer than before. I had the problem of dark prints before I did this fix regardless of how I had them printed, including 3rd party.

 

[Dominantly]

Photoshop makes the default color space sRGB. The sRGB color space is designed for "web colors", which means when you are doing your processing, all may be for lost if what you want is to process it for print, and not photobucket.

As recommended by Bryan Peterson, switch your cameras color space and monitor over to Adobe RGB 1998. Also if you are shooting in RAW (which you probably should be), make sure to do all of your editing in 16bit mode. With the standard 8-bit you have 256 shades (in Red, Green, and Blue), but with 16-bit you have over 65,000 levels of shades, offering more detailed and accurate representations of colors variances in your photos.

 

[Overread]

Sadly the OP appears tobe used PSE (photoshop elements) which has very limited support for 16-bit image editing. Infact when I process my RAWs I have them set to be opened in PSE in 6-bit by default simply because all I can do with them in PSE is resize and crop (pretty much - there are a few other things but its so limited that I find it easier to remove the converter to 8-bit stage from my photoshop elements workflow).

I do agree editing in 16-bit is the ideal, but not with PSE.

As for sRGB and adobe - if you are controling both printer and editing then by all means try this rout - only remember that if you want to show the image online you will have to save another version in sRBG mode. Further if you deal with photolabs most only work with a single colourspace and they will state this on their website (if in doubt though chances are its sRGB because its the webstandard).