Dark prints

Eddzz!!

Eddzz!!

Suspended / Banned
Messages
1,120
Name
Eddy
Edit My Images
Yes
My girlfriend surprised me for my birthday this year by getting prints done of some of my photos and mounting them in frames. Unfortunately it looks as though the printshop have printed slightly darker than the original files. I've looked at the files on multiple screens and they're all brighter than the prints... Is there a general rule of thumb in overexposing files before sending them off for print? It's a shame they haven't come out as they look on screen! I'm new to printing so any advice is welcome.
 
In my experience, most monitors show shadows about a stop brighter than they print at.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
In my experience, most monitors show shadows about a stop brighter than they print at.
Click to expand...

Thanks Alan... So would you recommend I boost shadows by a stop before I export for print? Anything other settings that should be tinkered with?
 
Really you should get the screen calibrated, but you could do a test strip print of different degrees of lightening and so on, see which you like best and save as an export preset. I've got my monitor calibrated by eye, it's not 100% perfect, maybe 99% accurate but I know that what I see on screen is what I get on paper (or as near as damn it!), even if that looks thoroughly different to the LCD screen on the camera!
 
In general monitors including the screens on laptop tend to be over bright when it comes to matching prints to screen. I ideally screen calibration is a must to get a good screen to print match.

But not everybody can afford a calibration device. maybe they don't have much printed or it's simply to much cost. So what can you do. Well if it's simply an issue of brightness, i.e. the prints are too dark you've got a few options.
a/ You could turn down the brightness of the display. Now you have some prints so you could dim the display until it matches the prints. This would give you a guide to how much brighter you need to make the prints to go off to the printers.
b/ The other method is similar, but to have an offset as an action in your photo editing software. Again in the software with the brightness set to normal, adjust the display image with the editing controls to match the print brightness. Now set the oposite as an action and save it( If matching screen and print gives you a -15, set your action to +15 )
c/ Lightroom in the print module has a Lightness and Contrast correction slider to overcome this problem.

Now neither of these is a substitute for having a correctly profiled and calibrated display, but for the odd print it should give you better resullts
 
Pookeyhead said:
A well calibrated one doesn't
Click to expand...

Alan Clogwyn said:
Really you should get the screen calibrated....
Click to expand...

Chappers said:
In general monitors including the screens on laptop tend to be over bright when it comes to matching prints to screen. I ideally screen calibration is a must to get a good screen to print match.
Click to expand...

We know! Most of the world's monitors are not calibrated at all though. I sometimes wonder how hard it would be for manufacturers to just set them properly at the factory and for everyone to work to the same standard.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
We know! Most of the world's monitors are not calibrated at all though. I sometimes wonder how hard it would be for manufacturers to just set them properly at the factory and for everyone to work to the same standard.
Click to expand...

Apple claim they do. However they claim " To an International Standard". No details on this. However even LED's will drift with time, so calibration will be necessary. However this is a good starting point.

However it gets more difficult with different computers to different monitors. an iMac and Macbook are effetivly closed systems, however and Acer to a Dell monitor is completely different .
 
Last edited:
Alan Clogwyn said:
We know! Most of the world's monitors are not calibrated at all though. I sometimes wonder how hard it would be for manufacturers to just set them properly at the factory and for everyone to work to the same standard.
Click to expand...

Some do, but monitors do not STAY calibrated, which is why factory calibration is just really a load of marketing BS to make you buy it.

There is a standard.. there's just no point factory calibrating to it.


Chappers said:
Apple claim they do. .
Click to expand...

Apple are talking BS. Mine drifts between 0.3 and 0.4 averaged Delta E after 200 hours use, and this is a vastly superior screen than anything Apple sell, so if you can drift that much in 200 hours, imagine what 2 years of drift will do. You'd be well over acceptable industry wide limits of accuracy. This is why they make calibration devices. If it was possible to factory calibrate and forget, there's be no market for colour calibration devices. It's also for this reason Eizo make most of their high end screens with built in auto calibration these days.
 
Last edited:
In that case then why not make camera screens calibrate-able? Would certainly save me a lot of editing!
 
This whole area is something of a minefield. There are two considerations - one is colour accuracy and the other is tonal range. Most of us can get by without spending even more money or getting over-technical. Horses for courses (off-stage sound of galloping hooves ...). Ok, I'm not producing product photographs where the colour has to be hyper-accurate, but everything has to be pretty close to my intentions or I'll see it as a failure.

Maybe I've been lucky so far? As mentioned above, if there's a discrepancy, try to tally the display with a print or two. There are soft-copy test images available on-line, & many a lab will issue a test print in hard copy. I've never had a problem with lab prints from digital files even when I've been flying wild, whilst some will propose that you must buy something more to get it right. If it looked right to me on-screen and I requested that the lab printed with no intervention, it always came back good.

Maybe have a look here: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
 
Ive only scan read the replies so sorry if I'm repeating here.

Ideally you should calibrate your monitor, but you should also load the printers proof colour file as it can make a huge difference when selected, especially to contrast highlights and saturation.
 
Yes, if you are serious about printing you should be calibrating your monitor. However, unless you are printing yourself, and calibrating monitor and prints, you won't get 100% accuracy. Most people can live with less than 100% accuracy. ;)

I had a photobook printed a couple of years ago which came out dark, but was it my fault or theirs? Without a calibrated monitor who's to say? I wanted what I see on my screen to be the best it can in tone and colour so I got a calibration device, and also not have me having to compensate for printers that were printing brighter or darker.

Awhile later I got some free prints from Jessops (pre going bust) and when they were printed out I first noticed that the pics had been cropped (borderless prints) even though I had cropped them to 7x5. I asked if their machine was calibrated, and was told that their machine didn't need to be calibrated. :eek: :thinking: OK, maybe new machines didn't, what did I know. They weren't sure why the pics had been cropped again, so they said they would print them again during the week. The pics were the same. :(

They then said they would print a pic with the white border and the pic wasn't cropped. However, the picture was noticeably brighter and more colourful than the previous prints. :eek: When I asked why they said their machine got calibrated every Sunday, but the girl who did it had been off for 3 weeks, and if I were to get any printing done in the future, get them done on a Monday. :confused: Obviously not what they had said previously. :rolleyes: I was so preoccupied with the cropping problem that I hadn't noticed the other problems till I saw this newer print.

After that I went and got the same pic printed in every place I could in the city centre, both with and without a border. Sure enough all the borderless prints had been cropped again. But nearly all the prints were different for tone and colour. Some were very similar, as I think Tesco use Max Spielmann print machines in their stores, so those prints were very similar, but others were totally different. The variation was stunning. :eek:

Some print sites let you download their printer profile, which with a calibrated monitor may let you get very good prints other than printing yourself.

If you are not going to do that, I would advise getting a sample pic of your own printed in as many places as possible to see which gets closest to what you see on your screen.

Accurate printing can be a complicated subject depending on how accurate you want to be, how much work you want to do, and how much you want to spend.
 
C-types are dark and muddy. Yuk. Try semi-glossy fine art papers like Baryta.

Lightroom has soft proof mode. You can download some profiles from the better labs and see how bad they will look like in print.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top