Newbie monitor calibration question

[gsrokmix]

Hi,

I want to print some photos taken with my K20 on an inkjet printer. I am shooting RAW & using ACR & PS CS4 to PP & touch up. I use a Mac Pro w/ an Apple Cinema HD display. In order to achieve the best prints should I be shooting & editing in Adobe RGB? I am shooting PEF. Should I swith to DNG since I'm using all Adobe sw?

I have read much about monitor calibration & am still confused as to the process.Simply loading a color profile won't do the trick? A hardware calibrator like a Spyder 3 Pro (which is reasonably priced for me & I've read some good things about) will tweak my monitor better so my colors onscreen will more closely match my prints? Does this need to be done often? I work in a small room with a low ceiling and recessed lights which are currently incandescent flood bulbs. No natural light to speak of.

I am not a pro but I would like to get some good prints without "learning the really hard way" if possible.

I'd really appreciate any advice.

Thanks!

George

[Frank Fletcher]

Hello George,

It sounds like you're serious about your photography and have invested in some very nice equipment. Where you go from here depends on how serious you are and how much more you want to invest.

The fact is that one could print a very nice print with nothing but trial and error callibration of monitor and printer. But I don't recommend it! Depending on how picky you are, it can be extremely time consuming and wasteful of inks and paper. Also, what a photo looks like on your monitor could be very different to what it looks like on somebody elses monitor. Lastly, if your printer has any kind of profile worth anything, then you may have to make "wierd colors" on your monitor to make your printer print what you expected from it.

That is the time-consuming and "cheap" way of printing. The other side of the spectrum is the ideal way to print/edit photos. That is to hardware calibrate your monitor to a given standard and then calibrate your printer to match your paper/ink/dye combination.

For somebody serious about their work, I always suggest hardware monitor calibration as a minimum investment. It can be embarrasing to post a photo on the net and have everybody ask why it's so blue and the shadows are all muddy!

Sadly, in this day and age, it is most typical that photos are shared digitally as opposed to printed out. If you are only going to print the occasional image, you might get away with the standard profile that comes with the printer. That profile, though, has no concept of what batch of inks you have (there is definitely sample variation) or what kind of paper you are using (different papers have different base colors and react differently to types of ink).

So if the final phase of your artwork is the print - I would definitely invest in calibration. You can buy the calibrator or you can hire somebody to calibrate it (for each ink/paper combo and recalibrate when you buy new ink).

The worst thing about not calibrating - constantly second-guessing yourself. "Would it have looked better if I had calibrated??" "Are other people seeing what I'm seeing?" etc.

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Shooting in DNG definitely has it's benefits - particularly when using Adobe software like Lightroom. The fact of the matter is, however, that you can get the same quality out of either one - PEF or DNG. The benefit of PEF is that the filesize is smaller and that can translate to more photos on your storage media and faster cycle times on your camera.

There's lots of info out there on the relative merits of DNG vs PEF vs whatever. Bust out your google!

Personally, I shoot DNG. I think the benefits outweigh the additional memory use/storage space/cycle times. Of course, I mostly shoot landscapes and not sports.

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My camera automatically tags my photos as AdobeRGB. When you shoot in raw, that tag means absolutely nothing. Raw is raw - it's just what the camera captured, nothing more and nothing less.

AdobeRGB was originally created by the late great Bruce Fraser because it was a good gamut match for the hardware at the time and especially since it encompassed most of the gamut of printing presses. Modern inkjets with new ink/dye technology are greatly expanded in gamut. AdobeRGB is still a good choice for a working profile - but it may not allow you to get the most out of your print (especially if you are using new inks/dyes like Epsons HDR line). It also future-proof your edited images. For example, if you have an AdobeRGB image that you've worked hard on and in 10 or 20 years, you become famous and your early images are all the rage - when you go to print the image on new hardware... well you get the idea.

Personally, unless I have a very good reason not to, I edit in ProPhoto RGB.

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If all you have in the room is incandescent lights, then you'll have a subjective bias when looking at your monitor - and especially when looking at your prints. This is ok if you are printing for a home where the photo will be lit by incandescent lighting. When evaluating your prints, I suggest that you go find a window, since most homes are lit by natural light during the day and incandescent at night. If worst comes to worst, you can turn off your lights and turn your calibrated monitor up and display a full-white image on screen and use that light to evaluate your image. It's not great but it'll give you an idea of the colors (if not the contrast) in the image.

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Ok. That's it. Now if only my internet connection weren't down, I could just send this thing...

Good luck!

Frank.

[WerTicus]

I work in AdobeRGB, I'd like to work in better colour systems but I need to factor in that my clients mostly don't have access to even proper sRGB so there isn't a lot of point.

Also my artwork is not strictly photography and is out of date in 12 months time due to the technology being cutting edge.

My printer can do AdobeRGB and so can my monitor (97% anyway). So its a much better choice than sRGB.


Certainly couldn't imagine working WITHOUT hardware monitor calibration, there is very little point in having a nice monitor if you dont do it. (seriously massive variations in colour between calibrated monitor and un calibrated).

You then need to get your printer calibrated also. The monitor and printer will never match exactly due to the nature of subtractive and additive lighting, but you will get a printer profile to use with your choice of paper that gives the best possible result for that particular printer.

If your really serious get a Pigment ink epson a2 or bigger and you'll be happy as larry with pretty cheap prints ink wise. There are places that can provide a profile for your printer, all you need to do is print a test chart out and mail it to them for each paper type you want.

[Alfisti]

IMHO i'd only invest if your ENTIRE system can handle large colour gamuts .... or sRGB fully.

I find lab machines often fall a little short (greens turn magenta) and most paper struggles then you have the problem that most web browsers don't get ANYWHERE near sRGB (again greens and reds suffer .... actually when I say green i mean cyan) .... so what's the point of calibration exactly?

[Marc Sabatella]

Originally Posted by gsrokmix

I have read much about monitor calibration & am still confused as to the process.Simply loading a color profile won't do the trick?

It's part of the trick, to be sure. But where are you going to *get* that profile? Answer: the only way to get it is to run a tool like the Spyder that can actually measure the colors your monitor produces. The output of the Spyder *is* a profile, that Spyder will also load into the OS for you. It's still up to you to make sure all programs you use know how to use that profile correctly. But if you want a profile - and you do if you want your monitor to produce the "correct" colors - the only way to get it is with something like the Spyder.

[Frank Fletcher]

more and more browsers are displaying native colors and are profile-aware. It's not there yet, but it should be standard pretty soon.

The output profile is not dependent upon the working profile. I'll hedge that statement by saying that the closer the, the easier the transfer. In any case, if you edit in an "over-gamut" profile, it can later be converted to a smaller gamut device. If you edit to a smaller gamut, it will potentially always be a smaller gamut.

It's similar to why many of us shoot in raw and edit as much as we can in raw. The conversion means a loss of information and flexibility.

Any decent lab will have their own updated printer profiles available on their website so your image can be tweaked on your own computer to opimize for their hardware.

In terms of quality, the reason to profile is so that your images can be displayed to the best that a device can handle - regardless of it's gamut capabilities. If it's less than SRGB (actually unusual in any modern screen that is profile aware) - and your Apple Cinema HD way exceeds SRGB - then you profilel to get the maximum out of it. If it exceeds SRGB, then you still profile to get the maximum out of it. In calibrating you are normalizing your display to a known standard and in profiling, you are measuring the gamut so that you can best display your photos.

Alfisi is correct in that up to now, browsers are notorious for handling colors poorly. Current versions of Firefox (even on linux!) support ICC version 2. See here: Is your system ICC Version 4 ready?. On the other hand, my cel phone (android G1) has no profile support. Opera on Linux also does not provide any native ICC profile support.

Safari (your platform being Apple/Mac) has long supported ICC profiles. See here: Color Rendering Difference: Firefox vs. Safari | CSS-Tricks


Also - you can see that if you use an ICC profile in your photo and the browser doesn't support it, your colors will look really wierd. That's why there is this attitude to not use profiles at all for the web. That is the standard practice for web developers - edit in SRGB and remove the tag when optimizing for web. For a photographer sharing photos with other serious photographers or professional clients (magazines, etc), it makes sense to tag the photos or make both sets available.

Note that color profiles in browsers mean pretty much squishy-doodoo if you don't calibrate.

[Frank Fletcher]

Oh and if you are confused now... where it really gets wierd is when you calibrate/profile your camera in your RAW converter! Since you use ACR, see here: DNG Profiles - Adobe Labs

Also if you are looking for a do-it-all-but-relatively-cheaply device, the ColorMunki has gotten decent reviews (at least when it first came out. I don't know what's good now). See here: X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world.

[gsrokmix]

Thanks for all of the advice guys. Some more to chew on! Will something like the ColorMunki be able to send it's profile to any printer? My wife has a Canon MP830 that I would probably play with before getting a dedicated printer for my Mac. I do music production for a living and don't even have a dedicated Mac printer yet. As far as matching paper to printer goes, where do I start? Will the manufacturer recommend a specific paper for optimum results?

Thanks again!

George

[Frank Fletcher]

manufacturers all recommend only their own papers. Go figure. Most photo-hobbyists will use the standard inks and play with papers/profiles to get the effect/color/texture/conrast they want. It's part of the art - not unlike choosing developer/fixer/toner/paper combos when printing in the traditional darkroom. Sadly, this aspect of photography has been put down - mostly by marketting by the printer manufacturers who dont want you to experiment with other papers (they only make money on consumables - the cost of a printer is probably not much less than what you pay). Also experimentation takes time - so it's mostly serious artists who'll play in this day of quick-quick-quick-easy digital.

AFAIK the colurmunki can profile any printer you print to. each printer/ink/paper combo requires it's own profile for best output.

[Frank Fletcher]

I just looked up your printer. You might want to hold off and save some money if you are using your all-in-one printer. Not that it's horrible or you wouldn't get better results - but that you would be usinga $500 device to calibrate your $250 printer. Ultra-high quality doesn't apply here.

[gsrokmix]

OK so could you recommend a good printer for reasonable $$$. These prints are for family & around the house.

Thanks!

George

[Alfisti]

Originally Posted by gsrokmix

OK so could you recommend a good printer for reasonable $$$. These prints are for family & around the house.

Thanks!

George

Go to a lab and save yourself endless grief and $$$$. Ink is scary expensive and so is paper.

[Sew-Classic]

If you just want to print your own photos, The Epson Stylus 1400 has a $100 instant rebate right now, bringing it down to about $200.

I know that I enjoy the "instant" gratification of printing at home. I also use some of my photos to make greeting cards to send out, and I just like printing out what I need, when I need it, and making the card. I don't print all of my own photos, but I enjoy the option.

[gsrokmix]

I will check out the Epson, thanks. What are some of you other guys using?

George

[Frank Fletcher]

I'm glad that you are getting current information on printers. I just haven't been following the market lately. The Stylus Photo 1400 is a decent printer. The R1800 and R2400 are the next steps but not cheap.

What is interesting is to see how the market is changing due to the economy. There are several very good older printers (like the R1800) on sale secondhand. Normally I wouldn't buy second-hand but the economy effects me too. If you can find a local deal with a definite try-before-buy, you can probably pick up an old R1800 for around $300 and an R2400 for $400. Alot of these photo printers get bought by people who drop the hobby 6 months later.

If you go with the Photo 1400, I wouldn't spend much on a printer calibrator. Find a calibration service and get it done that way. Also, local photo clubs sometimes offer the service or rentals of the hardware. This is a great way to get to know local serious photographers too.

edit: Just saw that the R1900 (replaces the 1800 with better pigment) also has a rebate of $150 bringing the total to around $400 over at Epson. If I had the money right now, that's probably what I'd buy even though some people have had problems with it. I heard that the combo of the R1900 and Ilford Gold Fiber Silk is quite nice.