I've been printing B&W on a 1280, but I have a large backlog of color. If you were going to start up color printing, how would you set up, specifically the computer for profiling the scanner, monitor, and printer. I have an opportunity to purchase an x-rite 810 densitometer for $65, and I'm thinking about getting that, but maybe that's wasted money. Gear? Epson 4990, mainly Velvia, and a 4880 printer on the way.
If you have links, I'm all eyes, (so to speak).
Jay
Indeed the densitometer would be wasted; in my experience, I have never needed one.Originally Posted by Jay W
If you haven't yet profiled your monitor and printer, then I wonder if you haven't found it less than straightforward to print B&W. Whether you are dealing with B&W or colour, you still need to profile, at least the monitor and printer to ensure that the black and white points are not set in such a way that you lose either shadow or highlight detail in the final print.
The X-rite Eye-one Display2 package will allow you to profile your monitor and the additional X-Rite Eye-One Input Module Scanner addition will allow you to profile your scanner. Finally, the Spyder3Print gives the ability to generate profiles for your printer.
There are other combinations of profiling solutions but they are either a lot more expensive or do not include scanner profiling.
BTW, you might like to consider a Better Scanning, adjustable height, film holder to maximise the sharpness of your scans.
My apologies for some poor information but it is hard to determine, from X-Rite's website, what is and what is not available. the additional scanner module will only work if you buy the Eye-one Pro monitor device, not the Display2 one.
Apparently, the cheapest way to get scanner profiling is to buy the EZColor with Eye-one display2 bundle, then you get scanner profiling and even printer profiling, using your scanner, all in the same bundle for around £200.
Maybe my method is less than straightforward. I use MIS UT2 inks with some curves developed by Paul Roark for Epson Enhanced Matt (my proof paper) and Hanhemuhle Rag 308. So, I print a number of test prints tweaking a number of factors until I think the print is "close enough." Then I print on the more expensive paper. (Paraphrasing, a print is never finished, it's only abandoned.) It never seemed to me that my monitor had much influence on the B&W process.
The few color prints I tried before switching over the printer seemed less than vivid. So I assume the color balance was off.
As for scanner profiling, I came across an interesting article here:
http://www.photographical.net/scanner_profiling1_2.html
Jay
Then I can only assume that you have been very fortunate in having your monitor set up reasonably more by luck than by judgement.
It's not so much the colour balance, lack of contrast is a factor of the gamma, which is something a profile will correct as well as the colour balance.
As mentioned in that article, you really need profiling software to correct a scanner.
The EZColor bundle really is the cheapest option and, once you have corrected the monitor and printer, you will find you need to do a lot less work in Photoshop to get good prints.
You don't have to make profiles, especially for the scanner/camera/input. Just do your Photoshop editing in a wide color space like Adobe RGB. And if your digital darkroom has changing lighting conditions or if you're using a laptop, etc. it seems the best you can do is to use the OS's software calibration to rough in the grey balance, color temperature, black and white points -- nothing extra or fancy needed. Set the Gamma at 2.2 and forget about it. And then just use canned paper/ink/printer profiles.
I'm happy with my results, said the former Pressview/Artisan/prepress operator. Really people make it more complicated than it needs to be thanks to the marketing efforts of the hockey puck sellers.
Unlike Frank, I could never get to the point where I could predict how a print would look without profiling my monitor. So, I bought a Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One 2 (now it's called XRite). The price was not high and the process was fairly simple.
It does require an understanding of the difference between calibration and profiling. You first fiddle with the controls on the monitor to calibrate, and then create a profile. The software uses the profile to translate the information in the file to something that looks "right" on the screen. "Right" is defined as matching the color information. For example, the RGB value 128, 128, 128 should be both neutral and the appropriate density on the monitor. The more you do with calibration and less the profile has to do, the more of your monitors native range you will preserve. Good monitor calibration and profiling software will take you through that process more or less automatically. To me, this is a minimal solution that is not expensive. The expensive solution is the continuously hardware calibrated high-end display.
My scanners came with profiling solutions in the box. The Epson scanner, for example, came with an IT8 target and EZColor. The EZColor package will also profile the monitor, and it will work with the Eye One 2 device, but I prefer the Gretag software.
I am using the stock printer profiles supplied by Epson with my 3800. Black and white with the ABW driver come out a hair darker than on the screen, but I find pretty good correlation between the points at which shadow and highlight details are lost. I just target the image file so that the middle values are about a zone lighter than I really want.
With color, I find that the printer is about 15cc less magenta than the monitor when using the "proof colors" feature of Photoshop with the printer profile. But it's consistent, so I make a correction during targeting. Maybe I could eliminate that error with a custom profile, but I tried one of those long ago with my 1270 printer and could never keep it from changing the way ink was applied, which muddied up my prints. I was doing something wrong, I'm sure, but I'm close enough now to be able to predict the errors and still let the printer stay in its "happy place".
I would recommend making a distinction between correction and targeting. With the easy application of adjustment layers in the newer versions of Photoshop, after cropping to the right shape I make my corrections on an initial set of adjustment layers, including spotting, color correction to make it look right on the monitor, dodging, burning in, basic corrective sharpening, and other things I might do to make the file "right" at its scanned resolution. I then add other adjustment layers as necessary to target the file for the printer. That way, if I get a different printer (or a different printer profile) in the future, I can just delete or adjust those targeting layers without undoing my basic image management. My process is this: I make sure my original file is in a wide-gamut color space, such as ProPhoto or AdobeRGB, and I turn off "proof colors". I then make the image look the way I want it to look, and that is my corrected image. Then, I turn on proof colors, and add new adjustment layers to make the image look the way I want it to look on the printer, which creates my targeted image. Before adjustment layers, I did this with separate files, but with adjustment layers it's much better because I can go back and reinterpret the image without having to go through targeting from scratch.
All of this is much harder to write down than it is to do.
But make sure you are avoiding common mistakes, too. One common mistake is to work in a color-managed environment with a wide-gamut color space, and then display or print on a non-color-managed device that does not display that color space accurately. For example, if you work in AdobeRGB and display on your web page, which is often not color managed and which assumes the narrower sRGB color space, the resulting images will lack saturation. If you work in sRGB, you will have targeted for the sRGB device without realizing it. Better to turn on "Windows RGB" proof colors and target the image separately for display on that device. The similar mistake is not to view the image using the printer profile when you are making your final targeting adjustment.
Another common mistake is to double the effect of the printer profile. If you use the printer profile to proof the image in Photoshop, then you want Photoshop to manage colors going to the printer driver. In that case, you turn off printer color management, or you'll apply the profile twice.
A monitor is internally illuminated and a print is illuminated by reflection, so they will never look the same. The trick is to learn the differences so that you can correct for them efficiently. The inexpensive tools that are out there will do that. You can, as Frank suggests, do nothing and just make each image look the way you want manually, but you'll have more mental translations to remember. I've done it both ways.
Rick "perfection is unattainable" Denney
This is something that I learnt to correct when calibrating the monitor before/during the profiling process. The EZColor software tells you to adjust the balance of the RGB on the monitor's menu but, what a lot of people, including myself, don't realise is that this is a good point to adjust the brightness output of the monitor to somewhere around 90cd/m2, so that it gets to be somewhere near the "dullness" of paper viewed under a daylight viewing lamp. So, don't be surprised if the RGB levels get quite low.
Which reminds me, it's about time I reprofiled
This is good stuff. I'll have to read it a few times to digest. Also, I'll have to look in the box (in the attic) to see if I forgot that something else came with the scanner. Thanks,
Jay
Thanks for this--I need to try it. The backlight on my Gateway monitor was apparently designed to provide for TV watching in direct sunlight, because it is too bright. I could never get it down to that low a brightness, and had to settle for something like 140. That makes the images look too bright on the monitor compared to the print. I'll have to experiment with getting a further brightness reduction using the RGB controls.This is something that I learnt to correct when calibrating the monitor before/during the profiling process. The EZColor software tells you to adjust the balance of the RGB on the monitor's menu but, what a lot of people, including myself, don't realise is that this is a good point to adjust the brightness output of the monitor to somewhere around 90cd/m2, so that it gets to be somewhere near the "dullness" of paper viewed under a daylight viewing lamp. So, don't be surprised if the RGB levels get quite low.
Which reminds me, it's about time I reprofiled
Rick "who does not, however, want to block up the shadow details" Denney
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