Costco callibration help

for those of you familiar with Costco - there is a link I can hit to callibrate my monitor to the printer they use at a certain location. However, when I clik it, I see no download- my searching end up on Dry creek and who knows what is going on with them (it seems more of a site to create a profile, rather than downloading anything.

My pics look great on the computer- but are too dark when printed

Anyway- Does anyone here happen to know how I can callibrate my monitor to better match Costco's printer?

Here are the ICC profiles. I'm not sure about the monitor though.

http://drycreekphoto.c​om/icc/

I would use a Gretag Macbeth to callibrate your monitor, then use RGB for the profile. If they're using Dry Creek photo, chances are that profile is quite old, plus SRGB works nearly as well with those types of printers, with the exception of it showing colors that are out of gamma range.

Thanks all. well, I checked the calibration and it looks fine to me.

I am not understanding something i think. If my monitor is calibrated fine *as far as I can tell* Why then do the pictures come out dark and merky looking? I printed with the autocorrect on as well as off. No autocorrect looks a bit better, but not by much. What am I doing wrong?

I am working off of a laptop- maybe that has something to do with it....

how do you know your monitor is fine? It's very rare that things aren't too light on LCD's from the factory.

Unless you have a calibration tool (hardware) it is very difficult to say that your monitor is calibrated. The closes you're going get to a calibrte mnitor is by using the adobe calibration sw.

I believe that you're confused by the monitor calibration and printer profile. It's a moot point for Costco to provide you w/ monitor profile and then point you to drycreek who are into providing custom printer profiles. Again calibration profile requires actual view of the monitor in order to calibrate it.

The printer profile ICC is very important because it tells the Photo editing SW that is capable of color management how the output is going to be and color space to use.