PRINTER CALIBRATION HELP

[HOMEYJAMES]

Hey Guys I need some help. I just calibrated my screen with Spyder 2. No matter what setting my camera is on..RGB or Adobe1998, same setting on Photo Shop CS2 my prints are always print darker. Now that my screen is calibrated, does my printer need to calibrated ????? I'm using a Mac and an Epson 2200 printer. Thanks Homey

[kickmaster]

If you are letting your printer determine the color, set the gamma to 1.5 for MAC

[DavidW]

I don't understand that advice. On a Mac, screen gamma is either 2.2 or 1.8; the use of 2.2 is common these days on all platforms.

Now that your screen is calibrated you need to switch to using profiles for your printer / paper / ink combination. If you're using factory inks, and factory paper, the profiles should be in the driver or downloadable from the Epson web site. If you're using factory inks and third party paper, you can probably get profiles from the paper manufacturer. If neither of these yield usable profiles you'll have to have a profile made - which is probably best done by a bureau, as the cost of the equipment needed to make quality printer profiles yourself is unlikely to be worthwhile.


Once you've got the profiles, head here (http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/tc_index.html) and read the May 2005, September 2005 (soft proofing is vital so that you can get a good idea of what will print) and probably February 2005 and July 2005 articles as well.



David

[snappa]

I may be wrong but if I recall correctly Epson charge for paper profiles. And it`s not cheap !

[col4bin]

Epson paper profiles are available for download from their site at no charge.

[HOMEYJAMES]

Hey Kickmaster, I changed to gamma to 1.5 it was at 1.8, what a world of difference, alot richer !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!S till alittle dark but I can live with it.

[kickmaster]

Glad it worked out for you!

[Meaty0]

Look, I'm still coming to grips with this myself. It's a very confusing issue.

HoneyJames, if you're using a SPYDER2, when you run it through its paces and it calibrates your monitor, it produces an *.icm profile called ColorPlus. As far as I can work out, this is the profile you should set in Photoshop CS2 and you should TURN OFF colour management in your printer. You will find "ColorPlus" in the list of profiles that come up in Photoshop.

It worked for me.

Paul

[Rob612]

Look, I'm still coming to grips with this myself. It's a very confusing issue.

HoneyJames, if you're using a SPYDER2, when you run it through its paces and it calibrates your monitor, it produces an *.icm profile called ColorPlus. As far as I can work out, this is the profile you should set in Photoshop CS2 and you should TURN OFF colour management in your printer. You will find "ColorPlus" in the list of profiles that come up in Photoshop.

It worked for me.

Paul

Works for me also. Calibrated the monitor with the Spyder2, set PS to use the Spyder profile, and let printer manage coloro using ICM (Canon i9950). Works fine for me, what I see on the monitor is exactly what I see on paper.

[Meaty0]

Well...to be honest..it "almost" works for me. My photos are printed pretty close to the monitor image, but I have a cheap 17" LCD that doesn't calibrate all that well. I plan to remedy that soon when I get a EIZO 21".

[Jesper]

If you want to do it right you have to:

1. Calibrate and profile your monitor with a hardware calibration device, such as a Spyder.

2. Get ICC profiles for your printer / ink / paper combination. If you're using an Epson printer with the original ink and Epson paper, you might have received a CD with the printer that contains some profiles, or you can download them from Epson's website.

3. Setup colour management correctly in Photoshop and use the right settings in your printer driver.

The website Computer Darkroom (http://www.computer-darkroom.com/home.htm) has some good articles about setting up colour management in Photoshop and printing with ICC profiles.

[DavidW]

HoneyJames, if you're using a SPYDER2, when you run it through its paces and it calibrates your monitor, it produces an *.icm profile called ColorPlus. As far as I can work out, this is the profile you should set in Photoshop CS2 and you should TURN OFF colour management in your printer. You will find "ColorPlus" in the list of profiles that come up in Photoshop.
There's no circumstances in which you should set the screen profile in Photoshop, especially not in any dialogue relating to printing. You set the screen profile in the operating system (the chances are that the calibration system does this for you when you build the profile - I know that my Monaco OPTIX XR Pro does). Photoshop picks up the screen profile from there and uses it.

In Print with Preview, the profile that you're being asked for is the printer profile, and if you let Photoshop manage the colour (which is usually the best approach) you must make sure you disable colour management on the printer. My previous reply gave a link to a series of articles that are predominantly on colour management, with details of which ones are most relevant to printing on an Epson printer.


With colour management there are a lot of wrong ways and few right ways.

I don't understand the references to gamma 1.5 in this thread, or where that's being used - that may be an empirical approach that works, but I'd argue it's not colour management. Colour management is about turning off most of the adjustment sliders and relying on profiles, even though you may have to make a few adjustments in Photoshop or similar to tweak the soft profiled image to taste before printing.


It's standard to calibrate screens to D65 (6500K if your calibration setup doesn't support D illuminants) and 2.2 gamma. There are circumstances where a different white point may be appropriate (if you want, I can hunt down the thread where we discussed this in detail). However, if you're going to deviate from standards, it's best to understand the standard first so that you can make an informed decision to deviate from it. Especially on a PC, it's potentially unwise to deviate from D65 and 2.2 gamma, as sRGB is a D65 and 2.2 gamma colour space, and so much software on current versions of Windows is not colour managed.

1.8 gamma is historic for Macs, but most Mac users agree that 2.2 is a better choice for photographic use on modern Macs. There are pre-press scenarios where different screen gammas may be relevant, but that's introducing unnecessary complexity and getting away from digital photography. sRGB is, as I said, 2.2 gamma, and I believe Adobe RGB is too.


Unfortunately colour management is a confusing topic at first - for example, understanding what the differences are between the Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric rendering intents does take some effort. However, when you do understand these things, you're much better equipped to get the best out of your system. The series of articles I linked to in my first reply are those that I find explain these issues very well from a photography standpoint, without getting excessively technical.

One very key point is that you only use a device profile for that device under the circumstances the profile was created for. You use your screen profile to display accurate colour on your screen, and if you change any of the settings on the screen you need to create a new profile. You use a standard colour space for your images and embed the profile, so that other users can open and use your images on their calibrated systems and see the same colour. You use a printer profile (which is valid for a particularly driver, ink set and paper) to print.

The colour management system handles the transformations between the colour space and your devices using the device profiles. It follows that you don't use a screen profile when you're printing. The only exception is for soft proofing, where the colour management system uses the printer profile to display an approximation of the final printed output on screen.


It boils down to this for me - I have a decent IPS based monitor (Dell 2005FPW) calibrated to D65, gamma 2.2. Following the instructions for Canon printers in the series of articles I linked in my previous reply and using soft proofing gives me a screen to printer match for my Canon i865 using Canon inks and Canon Photo Paper Pro.

The match would be slightly better if I had a custom profile made by a bureau, but the i865 is only a four colour machine (well, it has two blacks) that wasn't bought for photographic use in mind. I can't justify the expense of a custom profile on a four colour machine.



David

[Meaty0]

There's no circumstances in which you should set the screen profile in Photoshop, especially not in any dialogue relating to printing.

David I bow to your obviously superior knowledge. But I wasn't referring to screen profiles.

The Spyder 2 creates a monitor profile called ColorPlus.icm (I think) which of course calibrates the screen to their specs at the video card level (in my case). In Photoshop under Edit>Color Settings (I think) there is an option to choose ColorPlus workspace, which I also selected. In "Print with Preview" there is an option to "Let Photoshop manage print" or something like that and a drop down list of color profiles is presented. ColorPlus is also there and I selected that. The result was that my printing matches my monitor well. I'm not saying this is the recognised methodology...it just worked for me.

I also agree that there are plenty of ways to do it wrongly. This is a very confusing issue and it's a pity there isn't some standardisation across the industry.

Paul

EDIT: You also raise another important issue. My print matching improved enormously when I used genuine Epson paper for my Epson printer. It seems as though manufacturers do, in fact, make their papers to match their printers to match their pigments.

[DavidW]

You should not have the monitor profile anywhere in the Edit -> Color Settings dialog, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Photoshop (if you want to soft proof in monitor RGB, there's an option already on the View -> Proof Setup menu to do that).

The Color Settings dialog is nothing to do with your devices - it's where you set your working spaces, and these should be device independent color spaces, not device profiles. Normally you have your RGB working space as either sRGB or Adobe RGB.


Personally, I have my RGB working space set to sRGB, and I have the check boxes about warning on profile mismatches turned off. I often convert RAW files to ProPhoto RGB and continue to work in that colour space; this way, I'm not warned about a mismatch when I open the files. However, there's an argument to keep everything in sRGB until you understand colour management - it is possible to get into real trouble with wide gamut spaces such as ProPhoto RGB.

Putting a monitor colour space in your Color Settings means that you're creating files with R, G and B values that relate to your monitor's response the last time it was profiled - which is not what you want to do. Using those files on the web may well produce unwanted results, and you may get odd results if you send files in a monitor colour space to a digital lab for printing.


You're the second person in this forum to make this mistake in the last 24 hours - though it is an easy one to make. When you've paid for a calibration solution, you tend to feel that you should enable the profile somehow. In fact, the calibration system probably does all that's necessary to set up the monitor profile for Photoshop and other Adobe applications (including InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2 and Acrobat 7) for you.

Conceptually, a colour managed workflow looks something like:

Monitor <-- [transformed by monitor profile] <-- File in standard colour space --> [transformed by printer profile] --> Printer


On Windows, you set the monitor profile in Control Panel -> Display, Settings tab, Advanced, Color Management tab (or, on Windows XP, if you have the Color Powertoy installed, using the Color Powertoy). The chances are that your calibration system does this for you automatically every time you reprofile and there's no need to touch any of this yourself.

On Mac OS X, it's something similar to that, but I'm not sure exactly where because I don't use Macs.


The only program I know of that you have to point manually at your screen profile is the Windows version of Digital Photo Professional 2 (I don't know about the Mac version). Why Canon have done it this way, I don't know, but they have.



So far as printing with profiles goes, the profile is only valid for a specified combination of driver (though driver upgrades rarely invalidate profiles), printer model, inks and paper. If you use third party paper, you need a profile for that paper. Sometimes the paper manufacturer makes profiles available if you're using manufacturer's inks and a higher end printer.

For example, my Canon printer has profiles for Canon Photo Paper Pro in Quality 1, Canon Photo Paper Pro in Quality 2, Canon Matte Photo Paper in Quality 2 and a couple of other paper / quality slider combinations.


If there's not a profile available for a particular paper on your printer, you may have to have a profile made by a bureau or make it yourself. Usually the bureau route is better - the equipment to make quality printer profiles is expensive and the cheap DIY setups can produce sub-optimal results.

Bureau profiles made on your printer with your driver settings will be more accurate than the generic profile for that paper and printer, but in most cases the generic profile will suffice.



David

[cfcRebel]

I'm really glad Homey started this thread because i'm having the same problem (as many others do too). Intead of starting a new thread with the same question myself, i shall await the answer here.

Paul, Rob and David's discussion has definitely cleared things up a little but i have yet to see the bottom line. I have heard a lot of people did what Rob and Paul did, i.e. calibrate the monitor and point the system to use the new profile (*.icm file), then have Photoshop pointed to the same profile. I thought that was what i need to do until i read David's explanation. So now i'm back to "What i see is NOT what i get" problem.
I know the answer is somewhere on this page. I just need to read it 10 more times to fully digest it, and find out what the right way is in order to get WYSIWYG.

Thanks guys.

[DavidW]

It's easiest if I quote an earlier message of mine in replying:

Once you've got the profiles, head here (http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/tc_index.html) and read the May 2005, September 2005 (soft proofing is vital so that you can get a good idea of what will print) and probably February 2005 and July 2005 articles as well.

Click the word "here" above for the link. If you have a Canon rather than Epson printer, you need to read the June 2005 article instead of the May 2005 one.


With a calibrated screen and a printer profile, you can print using the profile (the purpose of the May 2005 / June 2005 article). The September 2005 article will teach you about soft proofing - which gives you a best estimate of what the final printed output will look like. Soft proofing isn't perfect, but it is a huge help, particularly with devices like my relatively narrow gamut colour laser where quite a few colours aren't available.

It may be that after you've saved your file in a standard colour space, you then apply some adjustment layers or similar to get the soft proof close to what you want from the final output - then print the file. The colour management system will do its best for you, but sometimes you want to tweak the results by hand. Soft proofing allows you to do that, but there's no substitute for printing (a so called hard proof).

Be aware that inkjet prints change somewhat over the first 24 hours whilst they fully dry.


The other two articles I suggested were the February 2005 introduction to colour management and the July 2005 article on rendering intents. Finally, the new March 2006 article is about problems with printing - usually, as Mike says, it's a case of double profiling, where you print from the likes of Photoshop using a profile, and don't disable ICM in the printer driver. Canon and Epson's documentation isn't the greatest, which is why the articles there about how to print using profiles on Canon and Epson printers (the first ones I suggested reading) are a great starting place.


Finally, don't forget that prints will differ somewhat depending on the illumination used to view them. The standard for viewing is D50, which can be approximated using some daylight lightbulbs. There are some bulbs available with a colour temperature close to 5000K and a high CRI, which is what you want for accurate viewing.



David

[DavidW]

You may also find this post (http://www.photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=1450906) useful - though this is more about how to make correct use of profiles, working spaces and the like.



David

[jj1987]

Hey Kickmaster, I changed to gamma to 1.5 it was at 1.8, what a world of difference, alot richer !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!S till alittle dark but I can live with it.
You need to change that to 2.2 and it will be dead on. Set your luminocince value to 100 for LCD and 80 for CRT (yes I know this is different than what they recommend).

Then when you go to your print preview settings, make sure that photoshop is determining colors and you're converting to the right profile from epson.

[DavidW]

I'll say it again - I'm really not sure where gamma 1.5 has come into this. Where are you setting gamma to 1.5?

As I said before, the standard for screen gamma is 2.2. In a colour managed workflow, the colour management system should deal with odd screen gamma values, but other than 2.2 is going to look very strange with non-colour managed programs (as the sRGB gamma is 2.2).



David

[cfcRebel]

You may also find this post (http://www.photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=1450906) useful - though this is more about how to make correct use of profiles, working spaces and the like.



DavidThanks David. Will definitely look into that.

[IIIMik3]

I have a decent IPS based monitor (Dell 2005FPW) calibrated to D65,

How did you go about setting your dell display to D65? I've got a 2405fpw connected via DVI, and i can't seem to figure out how to set the white point color temp in the on screen display.

[DavidW]

Following advice from X-Rite's support documents, and my own experiments with Monaco OPTIX XR Pro (which allows you to evaluate a profile), I don't change the white point on my 2005FPW or any other LCD monitor. Instead, I let the LUT do that via the profiling process - it leads to a lower dE value and hence a more accurate display.

Theoretically, the Normal Preset under Color Settings is 6500K, as sRGB has a white point of 6500K. I tell OPTIX XR Pro to calibrate to D65, 2.2 gamma and let it do its stuff.



David

[IIIMik3]

Following advice from X-Rite's support documents, and my own experiments with Monaco OPTIX XR Pro (which allows you to evaluate a profile), I don't change the white point on my 2005FPW or any other LCD monitor. Instead, I let the LUT do that via the profiling process - it leads to a lower dE value and hence a more accurate display.

Theoretically, the Normal Preset under Color Settings is 6500K, as sRGB has a white point of 6500K. I tell OPTIX XR Pro to calibrate to D65, 2.2 gamma and let it do its stuff.



David

Yeah, i've heard that "most" monitors come from the factory set at d65, but i was just wondering if there is actually a way to set it or not on the dell displays. I've been told by several teachers (i'm a photography student and have taken several digital printing classes) to make sure the display is set to d65, then run the calibration. Then when the calibration software asks for the white point, to enter 6500k.

Thanks David.

Mike

[mbze430]

On the 2405 there is no settings. D65 is set during your monitor calibration. the 2007 you can get close to D65 with PC Red but again when you do your calibration you will use the monitor's RGB channels to get to D65..

And most monitor (CRT) by factor default is 9200K

[csondagar]

I have ColorPlus and have used it to calibrate my Dell M911 CRT Monitor. My printer is HP DeskJet 5550. I am assuming that ColorPlus have set my monitor to the right Gamma setting. After calibrating I have not made any changes to PSCS2 or my printer. I am not sure how to set my printer profile as I donot have option to select a profile. Am I missing something?

[DavidW]

My experience with HP Deskjets is that they tend not to come with profiles unless they're a really high end model. Maybe someone can confirm whether or not profiles are supplied for your printer.



David