artelizabeth

If you turn down the brightness on your monitor all the way down- one stop from darkness it will be close to equivalent to the printing brightness...this should help with brightness-

markwilliam1

That doesn’t make sense! Why turn your monitor brightness down when you can simply increase the brightness of the printer?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

IF you load the correct ICC profile AND soft proof after calibration, there will be little need for guessing, brightness correction or trial and error. Once you have a completely calibrated workflow from beginning to end, problem solved. I don’t adjust anything, and I send my images to Bay Photo for printing or to my Canon Pro 100 knowing that the prints will be exactly what I see on my monitor (within the constraints of reflected vs backlighted images).

markwilliam1

Deleted

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Good test image!

And for those with dual monitors, it should look the same on both monitors. In fact, enlarge the image and drag it from one monitor to the other, stopping at each vertical column of colors and verify that the color is the same on each monitor.

Mine are calibrated and there is no deviation between monitors. But it wasn't like this when the monitors were new, and uncalibrated!

artelizabeth

You can't turn up the brightness of your printer...your printer is printing on white paper and it is much darker then what your screen projects. If you turn down your screen when you are working, it gives you a closer preview to what the actual paper product will reflect...really doesn't have to do with the paper profiling...the profiling is mostly for color...although you can adjust the native brightness when calibrating so the your screen is actually darker..

augieg27 Loc: Central California

Even after monitor calibration the colors will always be brighter than the printed image. So, what I do is simply add a little highlight to the image before printing it.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yes, the answer is calibration and custom ICC monitor profiling, plus standardized print viewing conditions, and soft proofing with the ultimate ICC output profile.

Color management isn’t difficult. But you do need discipline, and must be methodically consistent.

My prints ARE closely matched to my monitor.

one_eyed_pete Loc: Colonie NY

I don't know about your printer but your statement is incorrect for my printer and, I believe, most other home printers. The printer management window includes many controls that can be adjusted before printing including increasing or decreasing brightness. I use calibrated monitors and I prefer to make decisions during editing based on how the image actually looks on the monitor. I have tuned the printer management controls so that the prints closely match what I see on the screen so what I see is what I get.

Steve758

Mark;
In the broadest of terms you are correct, a monitor calibration in its-self has nothing to do with the luminence of the printed image. It does however have everything to do with trying to achieve an acceptable visual similarity between the monitor image and the printed image.

When you say you increase the brightness in the printer settings, exactly how are you doing that? And isn't that the same thing, lightening the input image so the output image is closer to what you want. How do you know exactly how much to increase that brightness so you get the correct output?

The only way that my print drivers allow me to effect the brightness is if I allow the printer to control the output. Doing this negates the icc profile for the media and all bets are off as to the output.

Happy Holidays.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

There is so much horse hockey batted about concerning color management. The whole point of ICC color management arose from the need to have What You See Is What You Get color, meaning that whatever your monitor displays, shows up in print, within the limits of the devices involved.

Somewhere in this, you should find something of use...

When I ran the color correction area of a pro portrait lab, here's what we did:

We bought nine identical monitors designed for graphic arts and photography. They were color accurate (for 8-bit color, as this was 2001 – 2005). We chose one of the nine monitors to be our MASTER monitor. Once we got that one right, we duplicated the results on all the others.

We calibrated all nine monitors with a Datacolor Spyder to the same specifications:

6500K (because we used CRT monitors, which were too red at a 5000K white point.)
Gamma 2.2
Black level 0.5 Candelas per square meter
White level 105 Candelas per square meter

We had a print viewing box with a dimmable 5000K, 93CRI light source. We set the brightness to the PPA standard for print viewing, which matched the 105 cd/m^2 white point. That is easily achieved by placing a gray card at the illumination position, and metering it while adjusting intensity to achieve about 10EV at 100 ISO.

EVERYTHING was middle gray — operator smocks, carpet, walls, tables, computer desktops... to keep human vision color fatigue to a minimum. The room lighting was very diffuse, shadowless, dim... with two 5000K GE Chroma 50 fluorescent tubes bounced off a white ceiling and baffled.

Operators were encouraged to stay indoors all day, and acclimate their eyes to the dim color correction room lighting before evaluating color.

We had several dozen large printers, so we chose one as our MASTER, and compared all output to that one. That Master Printer was compared with a Master Monitor for testing.

The custom paper profile for the master printer was used as the proofing profile in Photoshop or the simulation profile in Kodak DP2 lab print production software. It is the use of the proofing or simulation profile that gives you the closest monitor view of what the printer will print. Adjust images with the proofing profile activated, if prints are your main target use of the image. Use sRGB as a proofing profile if your output is to the Internet.

We ran a process control strip to check the chemistry in each mini-lab, each morning. (At one point, we had 40 mini-labs in the building.)

We calibrated (linearized) each printer every morning (we had to do that with those Noritsu 31Pro and MP1600 mini-labs). The profile was fixed, and it was changed only when Kodak reformulated papers.

Our prints really came close to matching our monitors. Our lab standard was to reprint anything outside of a 3-brightness points swing between any two colors. We strove to keep things within two points.

Evaluation was done with a standard image containing lots of gray scales, color patches, chalks, crayons, dark metal, bare incandescent lamps, feathers, leather items, and other random objects. If you've been in the industry, you know the one. It also has four portraits at the bottom.

Since we were processing millions of prints every year, we had to keep things in control to avoid wasting expensive color paper, labor, chemistry, and the opportunity cost of time. Before color management, we wasted nearly half a million dollars' worth of paper every year. With color management in place, we cut that by two thirds. Customers were happier, too!

The most stable devices we had were EPSON 9600 and 9880 44" wide format printers. We could make a print in January, then re-print the same file in August, and the prints were indistinguishable from each other. We used the Noritsu printer profile in Photoshop as a simulation profile when printing to the EPSONs, effectively "dumbing down" the color gamut of the Epson to the inferior (smaller) gamut of Kodak paper.