Monitor Calibration & Profiling for DUMMIES

The difficulty here is that we don't know how light or dark you have made the photo.

I would suggest a picture of something well known, like a post box or phone box, that you carefully adjust to look as close as possible to the original.

Then we can get an idea perhaps. As far as it goes, the daffodils look fairly realistic. The exposure cannot be judged though as the lighting is uneven and also there are bright highlights in the background. A front-lit subject will be much better for this.

Seems OK to me

Looks OK to me too, mind you this laptop screen is nothing to shout about!

I must admit that I haven't really set up my main monitor properly and I usually print a small test picture first because the print never looks the same as it does on screen.
I did once set up a monitor using WYSIWYG (I think) and I couldn't bear to leave it that way for general use - I guess you really need two separate profiles!

OK John, I have got a pair of post boxes here, sorry to go on about this but I DO appreciate feed back re: my problem from the top of the page, as I have now come to realise it will be a total waste of time setting up my website and trying to print images without there being any corellation between monitor,web, PP and printing.,
Please let me know folks if red post boxes look pretty representative of a normal hue to you all....
PS: they were RAW and I have done nuthin to them AT ALL!!!

Looks OK on my monitor, not quite "Kodachrome Red" (film users will know what I mean) but pretty close.

Looks like your problem is not the image itself but maybe the printer settings.

What Printer/Ink/Paper do you use?

Ditto, looks OK from here!

Yep, it looks great.

Must be a printer issue.

Looks ok to me to. Allthough I don't exactly know the shade of red that the postbox has.

Looks fine here Lilly, Huey calibrated LCD.

It's supposed to be Pill Box Red

Thank you for the positive feedback re my red boxes, looks like monitor as you say is sound now.

Printer details:
EPSON STYLUS PHOTO R245
Always use EPSON paper & inks

One thing I did manage to do yesterday was download the ICC profile from SONY website for my TFT monitor.
They gave me a choice of two: 6500K & 9300K, I loaded the cooler 9300K.

Now tell me if I am wrong but I decided to load the same ICC profile as default on my printer, yes or no :

When I print in CS2 I let CS2 decide the color management output.

My "gut feeling" is no, it's getting too way off. No white balance ever gets near 9300K, 6500K is much closer to daylight. And I'll bet your printer can't get even close.

The printer will have a mundane sounding setting for your paper, something maybe like "Photo Quality Glossy Film" or whatever else it says in the paper box instructions. That should do the trick.

I use Jessops Glossy Photo Paper with Epson inks in a 890 and a 1290s. I just follow the instructions and the prints turn out just fine. The printer settings are 2800dpi and -7 Magenta, with a gamma of 1.8 for colour prints.

I think you're getting over-complex with this.

John is right, 9300K is waaay too high. 6500k is much more realistic. However, your monitor should also be set to 6500K via its front panel settings

Regarding Epson printers... they have non-standard profiles For a printer there should be a profile for every paper type, and Epson bundle it all into one profile - and it's only their printer driver that can access the various profiles

So, that being the case, you have two options... and I'll suggest one of them

* Tell Photoshop to use the profile "AdobeRGB" when printing, and get it to adjust the profile. This means that if you shoot sRGB, Photoshop will do the colour transformation into the AdobeRGB space before sending it to the printer driver

* Use "Relative Colormetric" and check "Black Point Compression". (You could use "Perceptual" as the intent, but you may get a slight colour shift, so Relative Colormetric is more suitable for portraiture and weddings etc)

* In the printer driver, there should be a setting for "AdobeRGB" in the choice of settings (the other choices will be ICM etc). It's often buried away in a combo box.

* Be sure to select the correct paper type (as suggested in the paper pack) in the printer driver.

(Yes, I know that there's the possibility of two colour space transformations with this setup, but you really should be processing in AdobeRGB anyway )


The thing to remember is not that everything should have the same profile - but that it should have the profile applicable to the device. Photoshop and/or the printer driver does the mathematics to transform from one colour space to another (that's what the "Intent" is about - it's how you map from one to another).

I could bore you for hours on colour management... but I hope that'll get you started

Matt

The pillar box pics look perfecly ok to me but nothing like the red paint on the one outside my house. So what! It is absolutley impossible ( years of bitter experience talking here) to have the same image qualities across a range of media.

I have just realised I can adjust the color space setting on the camera
It has been on default sRGB all this time., I presume I am correct in assuming it should be set on AdobeRGB, if I have a main priority of printing images myself, editing in AdobeRGB :
Of course if I post them on the web I can convert them to sRGB in CS2 :

I spent part of yetserday wandering around the RHS gardens at Wisley. As it happens they have a photography exhibition which runs until April the 9th.

http://www.rhs.org.uk/news/photocomp.asp

In the exhibition were a series of photographs taken by RHS staff, and they were all lacking in "pop" and "impact" compared to the photographs taken by "pros". On second inspection the photos taken by the staff had been printed onto matt card, and I am sure that if they had used a premium grade glossy paper they would have looked much better - but then they might have showed up the "pro" images!