Getting your print colours right

[Pol]

many thanks for that Pol,sounds very interesting,i first printed them out on my little Epsom Photomate with some very cheap paper, when i brought the jessops prints home they were a little too colourful, & what bugs me a bit, is the backgrounds all muddied dark green, no fault of jessops really, up to me to do better as a photographer i suppose, still as my daughter said,,, all good practise i usually look at the eyes to see how sharp the photo is, perhaps it would be a good idea, to focus on the eye,s level, what do you think, thanks john

First posted in General Discussion

The key factor to getting good prints is all about colour management. The first crucial stage in colour management is to calibrate your screen. There are specific software packages that'll do the calibration for you.

As far as I know - most print houses have their printers calibrated for sRGB so that's the colour profile to use when you send a file away to be printed (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

So - if you have a calibrated screen - you can process your picture, save it and send it for printing and the chances are your print will come back near enough exactly as seen on your screen. The aim is to calibrate and save to the standard that'll match the printing service colour profile.

I use 'Spyder 2' software to calibrate my own screen and it suits me fine. I always send my files saved as sRGB to photobox ...... and they always come back to me as expected - near as damnit the same as on my screen. There are other calibration systems but I never used others so I can't comment on them.

Colour management is a huge subject - but calibrating your monitor is the way to get started. That should see better returns from the printing service - especially if you send them to an online source rather than fiddling about with putting them back on a SD card and trotting off to the likes of Jessops. I'm a simple soul so I use the easy route .. ie online services.

Colour management can appear daunting at first but it begins to make sense after a while. The screen calibration software and gizmos aren't difficult to use either. I do my PC screen maybe every couple of weeks and my laptop gets done maybe once a month. I can assure you anyone can do it if I can manage...... truly!

Here's a link that explains in more detail.

I hope all that makes sense.

Pol

[tarzieboy]

Re: resolution

hi Pol,
i have the spyder 2express, calibrated my monitor(after a fashion) when i first got it, i intend to do it again, but will ask my mate a computor expert to,
disable adobe gamma set screen resolution (i know how to do that)click the destination, know how to set the colour temperature, reset the monitor to it,s factory defaults , disable adobe gamma in the start up folder, etc,,so,,,,,,,not quite that easy, by the way, once calibrated , would one have to do all that again every time?,,,john

[Pol]

Re: resolution

hi Pol,
i have the spyder 2express, calibrated my monitor(after a fashion) when i first got it, i intend to do it again, but will ask my mate a computor expert to,
disable adobe gamma set screen resolution (i know how to do that)click the destination, know how to set the colour temperature, reset the monitor to it,s factory defaults , disable adobe gamma in the start up folder, etc,,so,,,,,,,not quite that easy, by the way, once calibrated , would one have to do all that again every time?,,,john

Yes - you would need to be sure the Adobe gamma is disabled every time, though it's possible to disable it permanently from the start up. It's ages since I configured mine so I forgot the details, which are included somewhere in the instructions. It's also explained on the Adobe website (look for ''instructions on how to disable Adobe gamma when using 3rd party calibration software'').

If you're not sure I agree it's better to ask your mate to go through it again with you ..... I know the feeling very well as I sometimes ask our eldest son to come home for a day to help me out with the 'puters and laptop tasks that might make me nervous.

Ideally a PC with a CRT screen should be calibrated once a week and a laptop about once every 4 weeks. That's because the settings 'slip' after a while so they need to be recalibrated regularly. I do my CRT (PC) about once every 7-10 days (the Spyder reminds me when it's due) and the laptop gets done about once a month - as recommended.

If anyone else can help tarzieboy here please do step in and add any advice and suggestions.

I hope that helps.

Pol

[tarzieboy]

Re: resolution

thanks for that Pol, i,ll probably be quite conversant with it all after a few goes,
it,s just a matter of being shown a couple of times, till one gets the hang of it,
john

[alpreston]

disable Adobe gamma

Yes - you would need to be sure the Adobe gamma is disabled every time, though it's possible to disable it permanently from the start up. It's ages since I configured mine so I forgot the details, which are included somewhere in the instructions. It's also explained on the Adobe website (look for ''instructions on how to disable Adobe gamma when using 3rd party calibration software'').


Pol

I did a search on the Adobe website on the phrase ''instructions on how to disable Adobe gamma when using 3rd party calibration software'' and came up empty handed - any idea where on their site this info is to be found?

[Patrick]

Re: disable Adobe gamma

I did a search on the Adobe website on the phrase ''instructions on how to disable Adobe gamma when using 3rd party calibration software'' and came up empty handed - any idea where on their site this info is to be found?

What version of Photoshop are you using?

Adobe Gamma on older versions used to be in Windows control panel and required disabling, but more recent versions of Photoshop, Adobe Gamma does not . If its not in control panel I think you can ignore disabling and carry on with your profiling.
Not 100% sure, but quite certain. I cant check easily as I now use Mac, but on my Widows partition I have Elements 7 and there is no Gamma in control panel and thats where it used to be disabled.

Patrick

[Pol]

Re: disable Adobe gamma

What version of Photoshop are you using?

Adobe Gamma on older versions used to be in Windows control panel and required disabling, but more recent versions of Photoshop, Adobe Gamma does not . If its not in control panel I think you can ignore disabling and carry on with your profiling.
Not 100% sure, but quite certain. I cant check easily as I now use Mac, but on my Widows partition I have Elements 7 and there is no Gamma in control panel and thats where it used to be disabled.

Patrick

This is such and old thread and I'd forgotten exactly how to disable Adobe Gamma. I'd also agree that it no longer needs to be disabled ... nor can I find it anyway (I'm using Window Vista and have CS4 installed). I don't think I needed to disable Adobe Gamma when I installed CS4 on this machine (about 2-3 years ago).

I left a mesage for Ian earlier, asked him to look into it or if he has any further info an the matter.

Pol

[alpreston]

Re: disable Adobe gamma

What version of Photoshop are you using?

Adobe Gamma on older versions used to be in Windows control panel and required disabling, but more recent versions of Photoshop, Adobe Gamma does not . If its not in control panel I think you can ignore disabling and carry on with your profiling.
Not 100% sure, but quite certain. I cant check easily as I now use Mac, but on my Widows partition I have Elements 7 and there is no Gamma in control panel and thats where it used to be disabled.

Patrick

I'm not using any version of Photoshop, although I've used it in the past at my previous photolab job.

Actually, after posting, I discovered that query was irrelevant to me, as I hadn't realized that Adobe Gamma was only part of Photoshop et al. and as such, doesn't exist on my home PC.

[Ian]

Re: disable Adobe gamma

I'm not using any version of Photoshop, although I've used it in the past at my previous photolab job.

Actually, after posting, I discovered that query was irrelevant to me, as I hadn't realized that Adobe Gamma was only part of Photoshop et al. and as such, doesn't exist on my home PC.

Have you sorted that out then? If you installed an eval copy of Photoshop in the past then Adobe Gamma may have been installed too.

Which OS are you running?

Ian

[rogleale]

Re: resolution

Hi Pol,
Quote
"As far as I know - most print houses have their printers calibrated for sRGB so that's the colour profile to use when you send a file away to be printed (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)."

This is not completely correct Pol. Many print houses use four colour printers, the old CMYK, rather than a multi-ink printer that us amateurs use. This can cause printed colours to be very different to those seen on our screen, and can cause the old complaint of "They have messed my colours up".

Users of Photoshop who have this problem with an image in aRGB, or Srgb, should use the >View > Gamut warning" command to see if some of the image is out of gamut for printing. The way around this problem is to change the image colour mode from aRGB or sRGB (>Image > Mode ) to CMYK as this automatically brings all the out of gamut colours into gamut. The on-screen change will very often not be noticeable, but the effect on the print can be.

I have just had this problem with an image of a vivid scarlet flower which lost a lot of it's colour depth printed from an sRGB file but printed perfectly when converted to CMYK.

Might help someone!

Roger

[Ian]

Re: resolution

Hi Pol,
Quote
"As far as I know - most print houses have their printers calibrated for sRGB so that's the colour profile to use when you send a file away to be printed (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)."

This is not completely correct Pol. Many print houses use four colour printers, the old CMYK, rather than a multi-ink printer that us amateurs use. This can cause printed colours to be very different to those seen on our screen, and can cause the old complaint of "They have messed my colours up".

Users of Photoshop who have this problem with an image in aRGB, or Srgb, should use the >View > Gamut warning" command to see if some of the image is out of gamut for printing. The way around this problem is to change the image colour mode from aRGB or sRGB (>Image > Mode ) to CMYK as this automatically brings all the out of gamut colours into gamut. The on-screen change will very often not be noticeable, but the effect on the print can be.

I have just had this problem with an image of a vivid scarlet flower which lost a lot of it's colour depth printed from an sRGB file but printed perfectly when converted to CMYK.

Might help someone!

Roger

That's good advice, thanks for that Roger.

Ian

[Pol]

Re: resolution

Hi Pol,
Quote
"As far as I know - most print houses have their printers calibrated for sRGB so that's the colour profile to use when you send a file away to be printed (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)."

This is not completely correct Pol. Many print houses use four colour printers, the old CMYK, rather than a multi-ink printer that us amateurs use. This can cause printed colours to be very different to those seen on our screen, and can cause the old complaint of "They have messed my colours up".

Users of Photoshop who have this problem with an image in aRGB, or Srgb, should use the >View > Gamut warning" command to see if some of the image is out of gamut for printing. The way around this problem is to change the image colour mode from aRGB or sRGB (>Image > Mode ) to CMYK as this automatically brings all the out of gamut colours into gamut. The on-screen change will very often not be noticeable, but the effect on the print can be.

I have just had this problem with an image of a vivid scarlet flower which lost a lot of it's colour depth printed from an sRGB file but printed perfectly when converted to CMYK.

Might help someone!

Roger

Many thanks for that, much appreciated.

I use Photobox, always sent them sRGB files and never had any problems so far - but I'll bear your advice in mind if I ever have a problem in the future.

Pol

[Fast Eddie]

Re: resolution

I recently did a calendar for my parents local Alzheimer group and the printers said that they use CMYK so either submit as that or else they would convert anyway.

I used the suggested free pdf creator (that they recommend) and told it to convert to CMYK then save. Totally messed up the colours on screen. Resubmitted as a normal publisher file saved as pdf (and hence i think just RGB) everything went fine

From now on I'd always let the printers do the conversion to play it safe.

[Ian]

Re: resolution

Many thanks for that, much appreciated.

I use Photobox, always sent them sRGB files and never had any problems so far - but I'll bear your advice in mind if I ever have a problem in the future.

Pol

I don't know for certain, but the traditional chemical print process that Photobox use may indeed be RGB. But commercial leaflet, business card, etc. printing using printing presses - that's a CMYK.

I had to get some leaflets printed recently and I sent a pdf to the printer and they came out with terrible colour. I was disappointed that the printers didn't query it. But they re-did the printing for free using the original Photoshop file and it was fine.

Ian

[Pol]

Re: resolution

I don't know for certain, but the traditional chemical print process that Photobox use may indeed be RGB. But commercial leaflet, business card, etc. printing using printing presses - that's a CMYK.

Ian

I use sRGB for Photobox - not RGB. I've never had any problems with that so I just stick with it. I rarely do any home printing either but if I do I 'let Photoshop decide colours' and they turn out near enough as seen on my screen - much the same as the permanent prints I get from Photobox. My screen is calibrated with Spyder 2

BTW - I should add I'm only an amateur hobbyist. I don't sell anything, all I do is for my own use, my own pleasure.

Just an an interesting aside - I used to use XaraX for graphics and that had a print preview that switched back and for between RGB and CMYK. Don't have that now but I remember the difference was often huge.

Pol