Brighten image before printing

[Glenn Mather]

My pretty simple but reliable method to obtain "what you see is what you get" is as follows.
Firstly, most computer monitors produce fairly accurate colours in the first place and more importantly do not actually drift much with time.
So with that in mind, do the following:
1) Edit a few photos (typical to your style) in normal editing software (Photoshop for me), to produce good looking photos on your monitor. So correct for colour balance, brightness, hue, shadows etc as required.
2) Have these photos printed by your preferred supplier (like many others on this thread I use DSCL of Stockport).
3) Check the results when you get them back. If they are okay - then nothing more to be done!!!!
4) If they appear different to your monitor, say too dark, then simply go to your computers display settings and adjust them until they match your test photo from your got back from the lab. Save the display settings "DSCL Profile" for example and you are sorted!

In other words you are calibrating your monitor to match the test photos. So, in the above example where your photos originally came back too dark, you will have gone to your display settings and darkened them until they matched your photo. So in future when you are editing you will find that you will have to lighten your images "more" to make them look okay on your monitor. The result being them will come back brighter from the lab - just as you required!!

Not as scientific as some methods - but reliable and costs virtually nothing!!

Any questions let me know

Cheers Glenn

Photographer Nottingham

 

[cargo]

Thanks Glenn Will give that aproach a try.

 

[Brian G]

Firstly, most computer monitors produce fairly accurate colours in the first place and more importantly do not actually drift much with time.

Well that's a lot different to my experience, which says the majority of monitors "straight out of the box" are set far too bright and have a tendency to emphasise blue.