CraigVTR wrote:DaveB (a member here) does custom printer profiles
Thanks, Julian's contacted me by email.
I notice your photoshop "Rendering Intent" is set as relative colourmetric. I use 'Perceptual' with custom profiles
Perceptual is a common default choice. It's what I generally use as a starting point.
but still find my prints are darker than what I percieve the screen to be, and I have reduced the screen brightness.
Matching prints to the screen is not an easy job. For example, part of your problem may be that you're viewing your prints in too-dim light.
Generally we want our monitors set up so the monitor is the brightest thing we're looking at: you don't want bright things around your monitor affecting what your mind decides is "white" (the brightest thing in your field of vision is assumed by your brain to be the sun and resets your internal white balance). Incidentally this is why the walls in my office are painted neutral gray...
So the lighting around our monitors is usually not good for judging prints.
It is possible to set up a print viewing booth beside your monitor so you can do side-by-side comparisons, but the colour of the light needs to be a perfect match for the colour balance of your monitor, and to do it properly requires expensive light setups and expensive monitors.
If your monitor is "too bright", the easiest path is often just to increase the ambient room brightness so the monitor is not _too_ much brighter. In my own office I have the room brightness higher than many monitor setups, but my monitors run at around 160 lumens. Of course the room lighting in my office is with daylight-balanced flourescent tubes so the colour isn't too weird, but not everyone's going to go to that extreme...
W00DY wrote:big pix wrote:...... and have you lowered the screen brightness on the iMac........
Yes, I even downloaded a little app which allows you to dim the brightness less than the default (which i have done by 2 stops)
What app did you download?
A word of caution: any app like that is probably going to do the job by further manipulating the video card's lookup table. Not only can this mess with the table created by your monitor profiler (Spyder/etc) but even if it did that cleanly it will restrict the range of colours available: probably introducing posterisation (e.g. stepping in otherwise-smooth blue skies).