Help with colour management

[Paul Shields]

I've been doing a lot of printing recently, using an HP 6970 printer, and have now mostly got what I see on the screen equal to what I see in a print. However, there is one slight oddity, which is that my prints are always slightly darker than what I see on screen. I've calibrated my screen as much as possible (don't have a HW device for this, so mostly reliant on Adobe Gamma).

One thought occurred to me - if I capture an image on my camera and it's set to sRGB, then send it to the printer using an sRGB profile, could I use the resultant print as a basis for calibrating the monitor? Or - is this difference in brightness simply inherent in the different mediums - a screen needs to have a certain brightness to be usable, and a print doesn't contain this luminousity? The problem is, if I adjust the screen to match the print then it becomes a bit too dark to work comfortably. Any tips/suggestions?

[ohenry]

Paul, here's a link to a site that may help http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/color_management.htm

[Mr. Pickles]

By "recalibrating" the screen to look like your print, you'll just move the issue around unless you do it as another profile, that you don't use. If your screen is 90% dark, and the print is 100% dark (just example numbers), and you use the print to make the screen darker, if you edit the images in this "screen darker" mode, your prints will be even darker.

If you can't adjust the Intensity of the print in the printer driver (Canon calls it Intensity), then you'll have to do other fancy things. I use QImage to print with, and it can use multiple or different profiles for the Screen and the Printer.

Are you using any Image Color Matching (ICM) features of the printer driver software? If you are, I'd turn it OFF if the images are not the same. All you would be doing is moving the difference around. If the Print needs to be lighter, and you need to use the screen to control it, then you have to LIGHTEN the screen image when you print it.