My prints turned out dark.

[joffa]

I got a spyder 3 pro and calibrated my monitor and sent some pictures of to be printed at digital works. Overall they look great, the colours are spot on etc. Only thing is some of them turned out to be quite a bit darker than they appear on my screen, even with the brightness setting turned right down to 0 and after numerous re-cals.

What can I do to fix this? The monitor is nothing special, it's a Hanns G 22" lcd.

[JM Tran]

before trying anything else or reaching conclusions, just go to another printing place and do some test prints tomorrow

print quality and colours and settings always vary between printers

[Philr]

Ahh... I use my laptop for most of my processing. But I have a Hanns G 22inch HD monitor as well and the darkness and colour looks alot different from the laptop screen (I use a spyder 2). I don't like it at all and am about to upgrade as soon as I can find another moniter I like. I think it is just the brand.... mine was pretty cheap I think around $250 for HDMI input 2 years ago

[joffa]

That's a good idea I might fire up my lappy right now and see if the screen looks any different on that.

[Philr]

I have tried to calibrate to match but I can't get anywhere near the same result. I would be interested to see what you reckon.

[TOM]

are you using the same profile as your lab? that would be the first step.

[Lani]

Also check what gamma setting on your monitor you calibrate to (if it has that option), that turned out to be a problem for me, and ditto with checking the lab profile.

[joffa]

Well I just tried the laptop, the picture on the screen was still quite a bit brighter than the print even with the brightness down as low as it would go.

The colour space is set to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as suggested on the digital works website. The colours are correct the prints just look a little under exposed.