Calibrated printed picture lighten?

[billhercus]

Printing from CS3 and Lightroom 1.1. Identical results. Use Epson R1800. Carefully follow on line tutorials. Win XP , use Spyder 2 for monitor calibration with all its recommended settings, HP LP 2065 LCD Monitor, use Olmec icc Profile and appropriate Olmec paper.

Colour within acceptable limits, not perfect but very good.

Just one problem. Printed picture is always too dark. What is the best way to do a calibrated adjustment to correct this?

[In2Photos]

Are you using Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual for your rendering intent? Try the other one and see how it looks. I used Relative Colorimetric and had the same issue. Switching to Perceptual, for me, worked great.

[billhercus]

I'm actually using Perceptual but will try the swop ....

[billhercus]

No discernible difference .....

Anyone else?

[In2Photos]

No discernible difference .....

Anyone else?
Do you have Black Point Compensation checked in your Color Settings for CS3?

[billhercus]

Have now tried BP compensation off - once again no discernible difference. Colors good - just too damned dark!!

Help!

[In2Photos]

Have now tried BP compensation off - once again no discernible difference. Colors good - just too damned dark!!

Help!
What does it look like when you soft proof? If it is dark then it just might be the profile for the paper/ink/printer combo. In that case use a levels adjustment layer to raise the black point.

[billhercus]

Soft proofing does give a very slightly darker screen image - but not enough.

Assuming your fix worked, how would you set it up so that it compensated/corrected all prints?

[In2Photos]

Soft proofing does give a very slightly darker screen image - but not enough.

Assuming your fix worked, how would you set it up so that it compensated/corrected all prints?
Use an action in PS if there seems to be a consistent amount of levels increase required. Use a preset in Lightroom to raise the exposure or add fill light or decrease the blacks.

Or just compensate at the beginning of your workflow and make you rimages brighter than normal.

Just another thought, what does your histogram look like? Good? Normal? To the left? Maybe your monitor profile is off. Have you calibrated again to see if you get different results?

[billhercus]

I'm thinking hard about the monitor. It is very carefully calibrated following all the Spyder advice they give.

However, this darkness is common to Lightroom and Photoshop which both produce identical printed images.

Must shut down now - but thanks for the advice - there is an answer here somewhere - very annoying to get color pretty OK but maybe too bright a monitor?

Tomorrow - the answer!!

[billhercus]

Eventually I gave up recalibrating the monitor. Instead of using the settings/ profile provided by Olmec for the R1800 and their 260gsm paper, I switched to Epson's R1800 semi gloss profile and early indications are that my problem is pretty well solved.

Soft proof screen picture looks pretty spot on although I will need to use a wide range of prints to make absolutely certain.

Need to contact Olmec now - they appear to have a pretty good support centre and I'm sure they will be interested......