Printed photos to match screen
- Thread starter bikeit
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Fred Kingston
Senior Member
I calibrate my monitor (monthly) and it matches with a bit of tweaking what I print on my Canon Pixma Pro-100... I have been calibrating my monitor(s) for years. Calibration takes into consideration the ambient lighting you view your monitor under. The lighting in MY office is different than the lighting in YOUR's... I see the term "calibrated monitors" used by the monitor marketing folks and don't understand how that is without consideration to the adjustments that a monitor can support. I suspect their definition of "calibrated" is different than mine... Over time, due to various burn-in characteristics of electronics, a monitor's calibration can change slightly... You need to re-calibrate and adjust for that... Monitor calibration entails establishing baselines for a specific monitor, then adjusting those (brightness/contrast) adjustments before calibrating for COLOR corrections... There are baseline standards for those that calibration software measures, and printer manufacturers use to align their products.
Turning up your brightness beyond specific lumen levels and then producing a file to match what your printer produces is hopeless... without a device to measure those levels, I doubt that an inexperienced eye can adjust those without a great deal of trial and error and a ton of printing. IOW, it's much more expedient to purchase calibration software/device and calibrate the monitor.
X-Rite and DataColor are two companies that cater to and sell monitor calibration software and tools.
Turning up your brightness beyond specific lumen levels and then producing a file to match what your printer produces is hopeless... without a device to measure those levels, I doubt that an inexperienced eye can adjust those without a great deal of trial and error and a ton of printing. IOW, it's much more expedient to purchase calibration software/device and calibrate the monitor.
X-Rite and DataColor are two companies that cater to and sell monitor calibration software and tools.
Fred Kingston
Senior Member
Okay... Gotcha...
They're NOT using calibrated stuff... With some(many) printers, you have to tell them to use "color correction"... Other wise, to satisfy their base customers, they're constantly tweaking their printer's output to correct for the majority of their customer's uncorrected stuff...
I could NEVER get stuff from a Business(printer) to match what I wanted... that's why I bought my own... Local folks just didn't have the resources to do what was needed...
Have you tried some of the higher end National print houses like Nations, or Miller's ?
They're NOT using calibrated stuff... With some(many) printers, you have to tell them to use "color correction"... Other wise, to satisfy their base customers, they're constantly tweaking their printer's output to correct for the majority of their customer's uncorrected stuff...
I could NEVER get stuff from a Business(printer) to match what I wanted... that's why I bought my own... Local folks just didn't have the resources to do what was needed...
Have you tried some of the higher end National print houses like Nations, or Miller's ?
Dangerspouse
Senior Member
Allow me to relate what happened to me when I was perplexed by this very same issue.
I originally purchased my Nikon so my wife could have high quality macro pictures of historical cross-stitched pieces that she was reproducing for her business. It was important for her to have accurate color reproduction. But when the colors looked great on my monitor, they never printed the same. It caused massive amounts of stress. I calibrated the monitor, then purchased a new monitor that was supposedly color accurate and good for photo post-processing.
No dice. The colors in the printed versions still did not match the original photos. And we were using high end printing shops as well as a series of home printers.
After over a year of frustrating research, and money, it turned out that the answer was soft proofing. It doesn't matter how good or accurate your camera or your monitor are, if things like the nozzle of the ink dispenser or the thickness of the paper are different than the de facto settings of your program, then the colors are not going to be accurate.
If the colors on your monitor are accurate, you need to get your printer to proof your photos - or soft proof them yourself with the printer/paper combo you're using. Learn from my experience here. Anything you do on your end to your monitor, your camera settings, etc., will have no effect. Your program needs to know what printer and what paper are being used so it can adjust its setting and make the colors accurate. If you're using Lightroom, it has a Soft Proofing tab. Use that to input the brand of printer and paper you're using. That's what ultimately solved the problem for us. (There are YouTube videos that can walk you through the specifics.
I hope this helps you. I wish I'd known it early on so I could have saved myself a year long headache!
I originally purchased my Nikon so my wife could have high quality macro pictures of historical cross-stitched pieces that she was reproducing for her business. It was important for her to have accurate color reproduction. But when the colors looked great on my monitor, they never printed the same. It caused massive amounts of stress. I calibrated the monitor, then purchased a new monitor that was supposedly color accurate and good for photo post-processing.
No dice. The colors in the printed versions still did not match the original photos. And we were using high end printing shops as well as a series of home printers.
After over a year of frustrating research, and money, it turned out that the answer was soft proofing. It doesn't matter how good or accurate your camera or your monitor are, if things like the nozzle of the ink dispenser or the thickness of the paper are different than the de facto settings of your program, then the colors are not going to be accurate.
If the colors on your monitor are accurate, you need to get your printer to proof your photos - or soft proof them yourself with the printer/paper combo you're using. Learn from my experience here. Anything you do on your end to your monitor, your camera settings, etc., will have no effect. Your program needs to know what printer and what paper are being used so it can adjust its setting and make the colors accurate. If you're using Lightroom, it has a Soft Proofing tab. Use that to input the brand of printer and paper you're using. That's what ultimately solved the problem for us. (There are YouTube videos that can walk you through the specifics.
I hope this helps you. I wish I'd known it early on so I could have saved myself a year long headache!
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BF Hammer
Senior Member
OK, my profession is printer service tech. I have been trained in much color theory. The short answer to your question is that your printer does not know how to make all the colors of your monitor.
A more in-depth answer: your computer display is direct light, and your prints are using reflected light. Direct light is using Red, Green, and Blue and blending them in different proportions to make the color you see (ignoring luminance for now). Reflected light is a completely different beast. We are using Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (ignoring black for shading) and blending them to make the image. For starters, the light source colors the image, the paper itself has whiteness and texture which also colors the image. Then there is the fact that the 2 media are using different color tables and translating between them. Different printers printing the same photo will also give different results, no matter how calibrated you think it is, or if you are using matched color profiles. You can make the image close in your prints by experimentation, but exact match is unattainable. Buy a new printer, and you start again from scratch.
I have untold number of clients who refuse to believe any of that, and I won't expect all who read this to do so either. But it is the bitter truth.
A more in-depth answer: your computer display is direct light, and your prints are using reflected light. Direct light is using Red, Green, and Blue and blending them in different proportions to make the color you see (ignoring luminance for now). Reflected light is a completely different beast. We are using Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (ignoring black for shading) and blending them to make the image. For starters, the light source colors the image, the paper itself has whiteness and texture which also colors the image. Then there is the fact that the 2 media are using different color tables and translating between them. Different printers printing the same photo will also give different results, no matter how calibrated you think it is, or if you are using matched color profiles. You can make the image close in your prints by experimentation, but exact match is unattainable. Buy a new printer, and you start again from scratch.
I have untold number of clients who refuse to believe any of that, and I won't expect all who read this to do so either. But it is the bitter truth.
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Dangerspouse when I find out what colour printer and paper the printer is using can I come back to you for guidance on setting up soft proofing please.
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Dangerspouse
Senior Member
I'll do my best to help, but because every printer/paper combo is unique I really think you'd get more out of a YouTube video than my amateur fumbling attempt at getting the info across. Alternately, the gentleman who responded just after me - BF Hammer - is a professional printer. Asking him would also probably get you better specifics. Either way though, I'll do my best if asked.
Fred Kingston
Senior Member
Soft Proofing is a process flow that's built into Lightroom...
That's a thankless job.
Fred Kingston
Senior Member
Peter7100
Senior Member
Assuming you have not already purchased all the printering gear and the fact that you are in Europe, have you ever looked at Pixum.co.uk? It is a German company and I find the quality of their printing to be of the highest standard and very reasonable also.