Pre Monitor Calibration?

[Onesimus]

Even after using a huey to calibrate my iMac, letting Photoshop take care of colour management, and disabling colour management in my Epson R800 printer, I am still getting prints that are too dark .

I'm assuming tht this is due to the fact that the iMac monitor is still too bright. This begs the following questions: as my iMac has a brightess setting, what setting should this be set at before calibrating with the huey? Or am I failing to do something wrong?

Any assistance would be helpful!

Onesimus

[ohenry]

I'm not familiar with the operation of the Huey, so I don't know if it has the capability to set brightness or not. With my Monaco Optix, one of the first steps is to calibrate the monitor's brightness.

I'm assuming you're using profiles for the type paper you're using. Soft proof using the correct profile and make any slight adjustments you might need. I find it helpful to apply a small curves adjustment and a slight color saturation adjustment targeted at reds and blues prior to sending the image to my printer.

This article may help, particularly with soft proofing

[Onesimus]

ohenry - thank you for your very quick reply! I am going to look into the Monaco Optix - hopefully it will be the solution to my "too dark prints" problem!

Onesimus

[Mr. Pickles]

The printer may not be handling any Auto Color Management, but is it set to match the monitor colors? Image color matching and Auto adjustment to profiles is different.

[ohenry]

Originally Posted by Onesimus

ohenry - thank you for your very quick reply! I am going to look into the Monaco Optix - hopefully it will be the solution to my "too dark prints" problem!

Onesimus

The Monaco Optix is no longer available (it was bought out). If I were buying new, I'd look at the Eye-One.

[ohenry]

I find these 2 articles to be VERY good for setup of CS3 for color management and printing.

color link

print link


Setups for previous versions of Photoshop are also available at the site.

[Onesimus]

Again thank you for your responses - much appreciated !

ohenry - thank you for the website links. A lot of good info at this site !

Mr Pickles - one question: how do you make the printer match the colours of the monitor? In my Printer dialog box, there is no setting to do this OR in the CS3 Print Dialog box, do i select or deselect the "Match Print Colours" option under the Printer Option to do this? (The print looks better with this option deselected).

Onesimus