I'm really confused

I've been doing searches and reading the last few weeks on what I need to do to get a print that looks like what I have on my monitor.

My monitor isn't calibrated. I know...shame on me, but from what I have read...some say you need to calibrate it....a few say no. Smug has the True and Auto printing. How does that work with a calibrated monitor? Do you need to set your monitor up with the printer smug uses? Sams prints it just "as is" so they say without any type of changes then what is submitted.

This all started when I printed out over a hundred photos from my smug site. I used the True setting since most were landscapes and some BW photos. I wasn't happy with what I saw...they looked dingy....so Smug printed them in Auto. Thanks smug

Then I had two sets of photos with two different looks. Which still didn't look like what I saw on my monitor. So I took a sample to Sams. Oh my...now I have 3 different looking photos of the same photo

Will a calibrated monitor fix all my problems? I shoot in jpeg and Raw. My camera setting is sRGB and CS3 is RGB. I change to jpeg to upload to smug.

If my monitor is calibrated and I print off my smug site will they print as I see them on my monitor?

Then if I do calibrate...which calibrator is good? I have a LCD Sony monitor. I've never changed the settings since I took it out of the box 3 yrs ago....another shame on me?

This issue is really starting to irrate me. I'm looking for a time when I can edit a photo...print it and be happy with my results.

I'm hoping someone can help me. Thanks.

Mary
In the last weeks I had a similar problem.
I want to print books as gifts for Christmas and sell them on line and I was needing to fine tune my monitor, calibrate the monitor that is.

I posted here about this matter and I received at home the i1Display2 to use on my Mac.
Disillusion or, shame on me

May be I made something wrong, but I couldn't see any improvement on the image.
I returned the item to it's origin.

And why did I want to buy a monitor calibrator ? Because the books I was printing from Blurb were not as good as I would like them to be.

I will be soon sending to WHCC some pictures for them to print.
Then they will send the prints to me to evaluation.
Then I will be able to see if what they are going to print in the book is what I see in my monitor.
I have to adjust my monitor according to them.

In fact, I don't have much to change in the monitor...

But I say to myself: "If there are so many people using i1Display2/Spiders for their work with good results, and I was advised by some "super griners" to get a specific model, I must be wrong ..."

But for the time being I will keep this way:
No monitor calibration. Mac pure and simple.

Cheers.

This is truly a complicated issue. I will try to explain a little how color display on our computers works and then maybe you can decide whether you think you should profile/calibrate your display or not.

First of all, an image is expressed in a particular color profile. You've likely heard of sRGB, AdobeRGB and maybe some others like ProPhotoRGB. These are standard color definitions. They define what each color value actually means. So if you have a red color that is described in RGB form as (201, 12,39), then each one of these color profiles describes exactly what color red that value of (201,12,39) actually is. And, it's a different red in each color profile.

Now along comes some software that wants to display this image. It reads the numeric values of the image. It reads the color profile that it is expressed in (let's say it's AdobeRGB, for this example) and it says "OK, I understand the AdobeRGB profile so I can translate the colors in this image to a known standard color".

Now, it wants to display that image on the screen. Hmmm. How does it tell the screen to display an exact color? If the software sends a 201,12,39 value to the screen, what color will actually display? Well, the answer is that "it depends upon the native characteristics of the display". It depends not only upon the display type and construction, but also on it's current calibration, and perhaps even temperature and some other environmental factors. In fact, one of the newer wide-gamut LCD displays will display a very different color if given that RGB value than an older CRT display.

So, how is the software to know how to accurately display that (201,12,39) pixel? The answer is that all modern operating systems support a concept known as a monitor profile. The monitor profle
describes for software on the computer how the current monitor displays colors. It contains enough information in it so that the software can look in the profile and figure out the answer to the question: "If I have an AdobeRGB value of (201,12,39) and I want to display it accurately on this monitor, what value should I actually send to the video card"? You can think of it as a mapping table that describes how to get a particular color from this monitor.

So, if a monitor profile is needed for accurate color display, how does a system get an accurate monitor profile? Because no two monitors, even of the same make, are identical, the only real answer to that question is that the monitor needs to be measured and a profile generated from those measurements. That's what the screen profiling software like Eye-One Display2 does. It has a sensor that you put on your screen and it then sends a bunch of difference values to the video card and measures that actual color that comes out of the monitor. From that data, it generates an accurate monitor profile and installs it into your system where color-managed software can then use it for accurate color display.

The only other ways to get a monitor profile are to install some standard profile. Better monitors will come with a "factory profile", either on a CD or downloadable from the manufacturer's web site. While this is probably better than nothing, since no two monitors even from the same manufacturer are identical, this is not as accurate as profiling your own display with actual measurements.

OK, now that we've gone through all that, you can hopefully see what needs to be done to give yourself the best chance of displaying accurate color.

Now, there are a number of other issues. Screens are transmissive surfaces (they gives off light). Printed images are reflective surfaces (they reflect light). These two surfaces have very different properties. Whites and blacks may not be quite as deep in a printed surface.

Then, there are color issues. A typical printer, ink, paper combination has a finite number of colors that it can actually produce. Your monitor probably can produce more colors than your printer can so you can end up with colors that you can see on your monitor that the printer is not capable of printing. The printing software will use various techniques to try to "map" the unprintable colors into something the printer can deal with, but there can be differences.

In my opinion, the first and most important step is to calibrate/profile your monitor with a hardware tool the Eye-One Display2. If you don't have a known accurate profile for your monitor, all bets are pretty much off for getting accurate display on your screen or any chance of that being similar to your printer. You could get close without profiling via blind luck, but it could also be far off and you'd have no way of knowing.

Beyond that, it depends upon how accurately you are trying to make things on screen. If you use extreme colors and may be running into colors that the printer can't print, then you probably need to learn how to do soft proofing in an app like Photoshop. Soft proofing tries to simulate on screen what can actually be printed, including color limitations of your printer/paper. To do soft proofing accurately, you have to get an exact profile for your printer/ink/paper combination. Smumug has such a profile available for EZPrints, though it's a bit of generic one because there isn't a different profile for each of their paper types or the different paper sizes that are printed on different types of printers like there really would be if one was being totally accurate.

Antonio it sounds like your going through the same thing as me only you did try to calibrate your monitor. I have read in places that some had problems with a calibrated monitor to...so it makes me wonder about doing it.

I checked out the link on where you sent your photos --- WHCC --- Could you let me know how they turned out?

Do you edit in Raw or do you just edit off the jpeg? Have you had any of your photos printed thru smug?

John thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me. I learned a lot.

I see I need a calibrator, but I don't want to run into the problem that Antonio had and it didn't work. I have read where people weren't happy with their results, but also have read were people were totally happy with the final result. Which makes this so confusing for a beginner like me.

Questions:

1. Should my camera be set to RGB like CS3 to make the editing process more accurate?

2. Once my monitor is calibrated...it won't be calibrated to smugs printer...what do I do then?

I don't do any printing off my printer. Mine is old and best used just for letters. I have a better printer, but haven't hooked it up yet. Just the thought of having to calibrate my printer to makes my head swim All I want for now is my photos to print like I see them after editing thru smug.

After having this problem with my printed photos I checked out my photos on my site with different peoples monitors. They all looked the same so that even confused me more.

I used Lustre thru smug and matte thru Sams. Sams lacked the reds when printed. My golden retreiver came out gray Thru smug the True printed my photos a grayish color and darker and with the Auto printing it blew out some of the photos. When my monitor is calibrated will this not happen? I'm hoping not.

Thanks you for taking the time to answer my questions.

Originally Posted by Dogdots John thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me. I learned a lot. I see I need a calibrator, but I don't want to run into the problem that Antonio had and it didn't work. I have read where people weren't happy with their results, but also have read were people were totally happy with the final result. Which makes this so confusing for a beginner like me. Questions: 1. Should my camera be set to RGB like CS3 to make the editing process more accurate? 2. Once my monitor is calibrated...it won't be calibrated to smugs printer...what do I do then? I don't do any printing off my printer. Mine is old and best used just for letters. I have a better printer, but haven't hooked it up yet. Just the thought of having to calibrate my printer to makes my head swim All I want for now is my photos to print like I see them after editing thru smug. After having this problem with my printed photos I checked out my photos on my site with different peoples monitors. They all looked the same so that even confused me more. I used Lustre thru smug and matte thru Sams. Sams lacked the reds when printed. My golden retreiver came out gray Thru smug the True printed my photos a grayish color and darker and with the Auto printing it blew out some of the photos. When my monitor is calibrated will this not happen? I'm hoping not. Thanks you for taking the time to answer my questions.

LCD monitors these days are not really "calibrated". They are profiled which means that a descriptive file is created that describes how your monitor displays color. Color-managed software like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom can then use this descriptive profile to more accurately display color. If you want color accuracy on your monitor, this is the ONLY way to go. I don't know enough about what Antonio did to know why he didn't like his results. It's not because this isn't the right way to get accurate results.

All I can say is if you wanted to get an accurate time for how long is takes you to run a quarter mile, wouldn't you want to use a tool to measure out a quarter mile and then time yourself on that distance? Not calibrating your monitor is akin to just guessing how long a quarter mile is and then timing yourself at that distance. It could happen to be right, but 99.9999% of the time it's going to be more accurate to use the measured distance and the only way the measured distance is going to be wrong is if you misuse the measurement tool.

If you do it right, a profiled monitor used with color-managed software will produce more accurate colors than an unprofiled monitor.

If you aren't familiar with different color profiles and when to use which ones, then you should set your camera to sRGB and you should keep everything in sRGB.

That is the simplest color-managed workflow, the least likely to accidentally make serious color-mistakes and pretty much all images on the web and with most consumer printers need to be sRGB anyway. If you start out with sRGB in camera, then you can just keep it that way all the way through your workflow with little chance of making a mistake.

You don't want your monitor calibrated to Smugmug's printer. You want your monitor to display accurate colors period. Smugmug's printer is also calibrated to print accurate colors. So, if everyone is producing and seeing accurate colors, then you should be able to take an image from one output device to another and get pretty much the same result. Because different types of output devices (screens and printers) have somewhat different capabilities, there are some circumstances where you won't get the same result, but as long as you don't have extreme colors in your image that can't be printed on Smugmug's printers, you should not have this problem.

So, if you are using color managed software, on a properly profiled screen and thus are seeing accurate colors on your monitor, then you should be able to have your image printed at Smugmug's printers and get accurate colors in the print.

Originally Posted by jfriend Smumug has such a profile available for EZPrints, though it's a bit of generic one because there isn't a different profile for each of their paper types or the different paper sizes that are printed on different types of printers like there really would be if one was being totally accurate.

I just re-read your posting and this answers questions I had. I've printed 4x6's, 5x7's. and 9x11's thru smug. Only with my 4x6's did I have problems. So they use different printers for different sizes of prints? And different prints for the choice of paper to? I never could figure out how I could get a good print in the 9x11's, but it wasn't the same in the 4x6

Originally Posted by Dogdots I just re-read your posting and this answers questions I had. I've printed 4x6's, 5x7's. and 9x11's thru smug. Only with my 4x6's did I have problems. So they use different printers for different sizes of prints? And different printes for the choice of paper to? I never could figure out how I could get a good print in the 9x11's, but it wasn't the same in the 4x6

If the EzPrints process is working right and your image doesn't contain extreme colors that might be out of gamut (unprintable) and you are using the same paper for different prints, then you should get the same prints whether it's a 4x6 or a 9x11 even if they use different printers. If you don't, it's their fault and they should reprint it. Their printers are supposed to be calibrated to a standard and all should produce the same results (within the limits of the colors they are capable of producing).

Originally Posted by jfriend If you aren't familiar with different color profiles and when to use which ones, then you should set your camera to sRGB and you should keep everything in sRGB. That is the simplest color-managed workflow, the least likely to accidentally make serious color-mistakes and pretty much all images on the web and with most consumer printers need to be sRGB anyway. If you start out with sRGB in camera, then you can just keep it that way all the way through your workflow with little chance of making a mistake.

I just checked my CS3 and under Image--Mode-- its set to RGB. No setting for sRGB.

If I open in my Raw it is set up as RGB to, but can be changed to sRGB IEC6 1966-2.1. Should I change that? But if I change that then my camera/Raw are sRGB, but my CS3 is still RGB. Doesn't CS3 have a sRGB somewhere??? Or should I just set my camera to RGB and forget about the sRGB? Wow...that reads like I'm running in circles

I also noticed that in CS3 when I go to View--Proof set up--its check at Working CMYK. Since I don't do Proof set up I don't need to mess or change that do I?

I'm going to get the Eye One Display 2. I was originally thinking of getting the Spider 3, but I've been reading some not so good reviews on it.

Thanks John for taking the time to answer my questions

Originally Posted by jfriend If the EzPrints process is working right and your image doesn't contain extreme colors that might be out of gamut (unprintable) and you are using the same paper for different prints, then you should get the same prints whether it's a 4x6 or a 9x11 even if they use different printers. If you don't, it's their fault and they should reprint it. Their printers are supposed to be calibrated to a standard and all should produce the same results (within the limits of the colors they are capable of producing).

Thats very interesting....some of my 4x6's didn't print the same as my 9x11's and then again some did. I just took a look at them. This is a good learning lesson for me. Get a calibrator

Read this: http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-color


John Paul Caponigro has a great .pdf, 6 Simple Steps to Good Color Management on his Techniques downloads page: http://johnpaulcaponigro.com/downloa.../technique.php

Check it out.

HTH,
Bill

Originally Posted by jfriend This is truly a complicated issue.

Thanks for the concise explanation, John.

Originally Posted by billg71 Read this: http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-color John Paul Caponigro has a great .pdf, 6 Simple Steps to Good Color Management on his Techniques downloads page: http://johnpaulcaponigro.com/downloa.../technique.php Check it out. HTH, Bill

I checked out the smug link and was going to download the ICC profile for ezprint, but it doesn't list that it works for vista----just tried it. I either messed it up or it won't work with vista. Any suggestions? I think this would be a good tool to have.

John Paul Caponigro's site is good. The 6 steps to Good Color wouldn't come up for me...probably saw me coming but I will try it again later.

Originally Posted by Dogdots I checked out the smug link and was going to download the ICC profile for ezprint, but it doesn't list that it works for vista----just tried it. I either messed it up or it won't work with vista. Any suggestions? I think this would be a good tool to have. John Paul Caponigro's site is good. The 6 steps to Good Color wouldn't come up for me...probably saw me coming but I will try it again later.

What do you mean it doesn't work for Vista? I'm using it on Vista.

All you have to do is install it into your system (right click on it in the file system and select Install) and then soft proof with it in Photoshop by choosing it from the profile list in Photoshop. You don't set your monitor to it. You don't convert your image to it.

Originally Posted by jfriend What do you mean it doesn't work for Vista? I'm using it on Vista. All you have to do is install it into your system (right click on it in the file system and select Install) and then soft proof with it in Photoshop by choosing it from the profile list in Photoshop. You don't set your monitor to it. You don't convert your image to it.

I did it again and it works now I got confused somewhat when my box that pops open in CS3 looked different then what was on smugs page, but I did it and tried it out. Wow...I saw a difference.

Thank you for your help.

Sorry, looks like a broken link and I can't find another. I emailed about it, maybe it'll get fixed...

Try downloading the podcast version: http://www.insidedigitalphoto.com/ca...agement/page/3

Originally Posted by billg71 Sorry, looks like a broken link and I can't find another. I emailed about it, maybe it'll get fixed... Try downloading the podcast version: http://www.insidedigitalphoto.com/ca...agement/page/3

Ok...I've been on the insidedigitalphoto site for hours now Wow...so much information and I've even learned -- Thanks a bunch

Glad I could help! There's a ton of info out there, some of it in terms even I can understand.... It's just a matter of digging it up.

Good color management isn't rocket science, it's just a matter of understanding some basic concepts and then being consistent in applying those concepts throughout your workflow. Once you get it, it's kind of a D'ohhh... thing, you wonder why you didn't see it in the first place.

Have fun with Inside Digital Photo, and be sure to check out the rest of The Passion of Photography podcasts, they're great!

Bill

Originally Posted by billg71 Glad I could help! There's a ton of info out there, some of it in terms even I can understand.... It's just a matter of digging it up. Good color management isn't rocket science, it's just a matter of understanding some basic concepts and then being consistent in applying those concepts throughout your workflow. Once you get it, it's kind of a D'ohhh... thing, you wonder why you didn't see it in the first place. Have fun with Inside Digital Photo, and be sure to check out the rest of The Passion of Photography podcasts, they're great! Bill

Your so right..there is a ton of info out there. And I do get a grasp of some of it Well maybe

If you could let me know if I have this right:

1. Set my camera to RGB
2. Setting in CS3 --- Adobe ProPhoto, Edit color settings to North American
3. Turn on my gamut warning...yes or no? Some said yes..some said no.
4. I have the ICC downloaded to my CS3 for smugs printer.

Or...should I go back to a point and shoot camera

Mary,

1) If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter what you set the camera to, the RAW converter settings determine the color space. If you're shooting jpeg, it does but start shooting RAW. Right Now! Period! End of statement!

2) North American Prepress 2, change color space to ProPhoto.

3) Gamut Warning is one of those legacy things in PS, it tells you what's out of gamut but not how much. If something's a little out of gamut, you may never notice. If it's a lot, your print will come back looking like the South end of a Northbound Fido, but there's no way to tell using Gamut Warning. You're better off using the View-Proof Setup option, choose Custom and then select your profile in the Device to Simulate dropdown.

Here's how I do it:

a) Open the image in PS, then select Image-Duplicate. This gives me two copies of my image, one I can use for a reference and another that will look like my print. The object is, obviously, to make the print look like the finished, edited image I'm seeing on the monitor,

b) Now go to Window-Arrange and select either Tile Horizontally or Tile Vertically depending on whether the image is landscape or portrait format. Now go back into Window-Arrange and choose Match Zoom and Location. You now have two images either side-by side or one over the other, and whatever you do to one image in the way of scrolling and zooming is reflected in the other.

c) Select either the original image or the copy, depending on your workflow and which image you want to edit, go to View-Proof Setup-Custom and select the printer profile you're going to use in the Device to Simulate dropdown list. Be sure to check the Black Point Compensation and the Simulate Paper Color(they should have named it "Make My Photo Look Like Crap" ) boxes. Check the Preview box, now you can see side-by-side the way your image will print versus how you want it to look. Before you click OK, change the Rendering Intent between Relative and Perceptual a couple of times to see which is going to get you closest from the printed image to your original.

d) Click OK, now you have two images, one that looks like you want it to and another that looks like the way it will print on paper. The object is to make the print file look like the original that you edited. Most of the time, the proof image will be a little duller, all you'll need is to add a Curves adjustment layer and boost contrast a little. If colors are very saturated in the original and end up looking like mush in the proof image, you'll need to go further and do some selective masking and saturation/hue adjustments. Play around a little, get it as close as you can.

e) Now resize the file for your print size, do an Edit-Convert To Profile to sRGB, change it to 8-bit and save it as a .jpeg print file, giving it a descriptive name so you'll know what it is later. Before resizing, profile conversion and saving as a jpeg, I'd save a layered copy as a .psd or .tif so you can go back and make changes later if you need to.

Upload it to your printer, tell them "Don't Mess With My File" or whatever, and you're done. Now you stand a better-than-average chance of getting a print that pretty much looks like what you wanted. If you really want to get that last 10%, or 5%, or 2%, whatever, out of your print, you'll have to move on to doing hard proofs, but that's really difficult unless you're doing your own printing and is a whole 'nother subject.....

It sounds like a complicated process, but once you run through it a couple of times it really becomes a second-nature thing, just another step in the workflow.

HTH,
Bill