Accurate Colour Reproduction

[Dylfish]

Sorry Guys,

Another question here, I’ve been printing off a few photos as of late and I’ve noticed that even though 90% of the colours are close enough to perfect there’s a few that are just a little off. The 2 that I have noticed are the blacks are coming out a lot darker than the screen and the blues are a lot lighter.

A few that I printed last night had rather vibrant blue skies which when printed decided to transform themselves into more of a tame baby blue while the other colours seemed rather true to the screen. I’m using the correct printer paper profiles, letting Photoshop manage the profiles and have my screen calibrated properly and I’m wondering if there’s anything that you guys can think of?

Printer : Epson 1410
PS CS4
Using Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper.

Not sure if ill just need to adjust before printing in the future and its just a shortcoming of home printing or if there’s a setting I may be missing or able to try?

[AndreaB]

i know nothing about this sort of thing, but if your colors are not printing the same as your screen shows, i would guess you need to calibrate your monitor.

[soulman]

How do you calibrate your screen and what brightness do you set it to? Do you use custom profiles for the paper/printer combo or just the Epson ones from the web? It sounds to me like your screen is too bright - very common - and your profiles are not quite right somewhere. Colour management is not easy and I've found blues to be particularly tough to get right on my system.

[Dylfish]

my monitor is set @ about 40% brightness on my mac and I calibrate my screen with a Spyder 3 pro.

The brightness on the images is about correct on the prints but its just the blues im having issues with.

I am using epsons default paper profiles that came with my printer since im using genuine paper. Without upgrading my calibration hardware to include printer profiling software whats my best options for matching up prints?

[soulman]

I've had custom profiles done by ImageScience in Melbourne. That's cheaper than buying the gear to make your own paper profiles. There are so many variables with colour management that, without going through it with you piece by piece, it is fairly difficult to be sure of the problem. Sorry. If you think you're pretty close, maybe try some manual adjustments in the print driver perhaps. There is a lot of info about this on the web because nearly everyone has problems with it. Epson has a good White Paper on colour management & Adobe has some good stuff too.

[Dylfish]

Im going to get custom print profiles done from image science, the question I have is the reason I like to print at home is that the last lab prints I got done were very dark (even with my monitor brightness down to nearly zip) and now when I edit (50% brightness) the brightness of my prints are pretty spot on except for the inconsistencies with the blues.

Will the profile affect the brightness of the prints or just the colours that are coming out. (as I just want to change the colours)

[soulman]

You probably need to talk to the ImageScience people about this, but the custom profile should ensure that your printer accurately renders the image data. If your monitor is also accurately rendering the image data, then you will be as close as you'll ever get. The thing is that monitor brightness is an important part of this, so unless your brightness is correct, there will still be differences.

Also worth noting that the owner of ImageScience is rather prejudiced against Macs. I get his newsletter and his anti-Apple rants don't do anything for his credibility in my book. I think he's otherwise pretty switched on though.

[Boo53]

Dylan

I think we must have bought our 1410's at almost the same time.

I am using Ilford paper & their profiles, but also thought the blues & some greys were a bit off at first.

reading through several forums I ended up on a site that was a review of the 1400 (us version) from when it first came out. The reviewer commented that he had magenta problems with the test unit, but did a print head clean and it resolved it.

I had done a check, which indicated my heads were ok, but after reading that forced it to do a clean and there was a significant improvement

John r