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?

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.

What we haven't established so far is what colour it is meant to be?

Why not post a picture of something that we all know the colour of, like maybe a telephone box.

:

We have three computers here and all three show the same colour, not 100% exactly but very closely and with enough certainty to be able to process images on any of them. We make small mental adjustments depending upon which monitor is in use.

Your picture looks incredibly green to us. I've never, ever seen any sky that colour.

I think first of all I would reset all defaults and then, if a CRT, run Adobe Gamma. Then I would go into the printer driver and reset everything according to the paper in use. I would use highest quality paper, and always the same one. I would use manufacturers original inks.

The, if there was still a problem I would get a Spider or huey or whatever else was appropriate. But it shouldn't be an essential for normal everyday use.

Also check that all the colour spaces are the same. Is the camera set to the same as Photoshop and the printer? Is there a mismatch?

In summary, I would go back to basics, checking every step of the path from image capture to print.

What colour is your seascape on your monitor?

Your monitor will only show sRGB properly and I would imagine that profiling as AdobeRGB would compound any problems you are having. Although AdobeRGB does have a wider gamut (range of colours) prints may end up looking a little flat.

The web can only cope with sRGB, so anything beyond that is wasted.

My advice is don't get over-complicated with these sort of things. The photography itself is more important and taking great images will absorb most of a photographers efforts for a very long time. The theory about using wider colour spaces, and indeed RAW capture, may be very sound indeed, but as I travel around judging competitions I see very little evidence that this is translated into a positive benefit in the final print.

I never did have a problem with dust spots (not so far anyway) so I leave the cleaning switched off.

My logic for this is that I don't shake electronics more than necessary. Even if the system is deigned to stand up to the wear and tear it seems logical that if you don't shake it it might last even longer.

Just a thought.

There were suggestions that digital still cameras with the facility to record movie images might be classed in the same category as camcorders.

You can see from your list how convenient tax collectors would find that...

There has been a bit of discussion over various metering pronlems, so I'm starting a thread where we can offer our own techniques. Maybe some good bits of information will come out of it.

My metering technique is very, very simple.

I generally use Av, set the aperture I want to control depth of field or indeed to give me the shutter speed I need.

Use matrix or cenre-weighted metering depending on the camera and use the exposure compensation dial to adjust the esposure according to the scene.

The tricky bit will be judging how much compensation, if any, but that's just a matter of practice. With digital, you can see the effect straight away anyway, so the learning curve will be much faster than it ever was with film.

Behind this is a very simple use of the Zone System. A 18% grey is Zone 5 and the meter will measure everything on that basis. Point at a white wall and it will make it Zone 5, grey. So if I want a touch of detail in a white wall then that is Zone 8 and it needs 3 stops more exposure to get that.

Point at a black cat and that can be Zone 2, so we need three stops less exposure.

This gives us a 6 stop range, which our digital cameras can just about tolerate. So in practice the exposure can be clipped a little at either end if necessary, but for digital, like slide film, over-exposure is the killer to I would shy short of 3 stops in my example and adjust afterwards in PS.

The result of this is correct exposure 99% of the time, the 1% being human error and carelessness....

If you use Photoshop CS2 you can just dial in all the filters you mention in 100 steps of strength. I ofetn use the 81 at its default setting of 25%.

In the days when we all used aperture rings and focused manually, it made better sense to use camera lenses that all worked the same way. Otherwise, you pick up your medium format and it focuses and changes aperture back to front.

Not a big deal until you are under stress in the middle of some event and get it wrong.

So in 35mm, Pentax and Nikon turn the same way.

In medium format, it's Pentax and Bronica (I wonder of that is because early Bronica lenses were Nikkors?).

So for reasons of ergonomics, I used Pentax medium format, having first trird mamiya and found out the hard way. As usual.