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this photo look perfect on my screen but my printer wont print it right. on printer its darker and there are pronouced tonal variations on his face, (especially the cheekbones/ ridge of nose vs the area around his mouth), and looks a little dark. on my monitor the face looks very evenly exposed and quite bright.



histogram looks good but not particuarly helpful in this case.

On my color (but NOT luminosity) calibrated screen this looks good. There is a touch of sepia?

What you need is the top range printer calibrator from Spyder. Otherwise it's trial and error until you hit the spot.

I don't print much, but from what I have read, this is to be expected.
Basically, monitors add light to create an image. Printers add darkness. There is a fundamental dichotomy here.
To print, you need to lighten the darker areas so they don't go too far into black.

there is a slight blue tint surenj. i have lookied into spyder b4, may have to revisit.
good point greg

Chris,

Is your monitor calibrated?

What profile are you using on the printer?

gstark wrote:Chris,

Is your monitor calibrated?

What profile are you using on the printer?

no, not calibrated. first time ive had this problem though.
profile is nikon adobeRGB, (same profile as camera.)

Rooz wrote:there is a slight blue tint surenj.

That is very concerning! I am pretty sure I see Sepia in this! Can anyone else confirm? [I am using color managed Firefox]

fixed...sort of.

i printed direct out of NX2 and its perfect. when printing using epson software its still crap. so it must be some setting in the epson software that i have screwed up somewhere.

Rooz wrote:fixed...sort of.

Nice! Whoever said that one needs a color calibrator??

I am still keen to hear about whether anyone else sees blue in this image. My monitor must be packing it in?

Great shot Rooz!!

surenj wrote:

Rooz wrote:fixed...sort of.

Nice! Whoever said that one needs a color calibrator??

I am still keen to hear about whether anyone else sees blue in this image. My monitor must be packing it in?

Def more blue than sepia...

I can't seem to notice any sepia or blue in the image :/
As a guy who had a massive panic attack regarding colour monitor calibration in the past week or two, I finally calibrated my monitor with a Huey Pro unit and finetuned the white point (which governs the colour temperature of the monitor to match prints). I've noticed that my screen (Wacom multitouch LCD) when compared to calibration and prints is substantially colder and brighter, but that has been fixed (hopefully) now.

The screen looks fine to me. No colour cast at all. But then I'm colour blind, so ignore me.

Interesting... the work monitor also looks Sepia. I will post some color measurements from home.

surenj wrote:Interesting... the work monitor also looks Sepia. I will post some color measurements from home.

lol...definately no sepia in that shot buddy. its a mono image with a 5% grey/blue tint added as an overlay.
still no idea why epson software is not printing right. i adjusted all of the settigns to make sure its the right colour profile and it still prints underexposed, diference between nx2 print and epson software print looks like its aroudn 2 stops darker. any ideas why that is ? its printing off jpeg. maybe i'll convert to tiff ?

Maybe DaveB can help you with this printing issue Rooz?

Rooz wrote:lol...definately no sepia in that shot buddy. its a mono image with a 5% grey/blue tint added as an overlay.

Very interesting. When I measured the colors it looks like RGB measurements are alsmost the same value in all pixels! I think the people who are seeing the non color cast version are correct.

its only 5% so if people cant see a bit of blue thats not surprising. its just there to cool it down a tiny bit.

If it prints too dark, the obvious conclusion is that you monitor is too bright, which will be the case if you accept default settings.

On my rig the image is well exposed and very neutral B&W apart from a teeny weeny touch of cool....which I wouldn't worry about. Printers can be annoyingly fussy about some images....just adjust the image to suit the fickle printer. In particular, check the levels....if they are not set correctly then the printer will print dark and muddy.