Hello Everyone!
I'm new to OSP and loving it. The company I work for has made the switch to digital for wedding photography. It's phenominal, I love it. I only have one big problem. I can make an image look PERFECT on my monitor, but by the time our machine upstairs prints it, it looks really bad. The color is WAY off, and it's far too dark. If I use the spider to calibrate my monitor to the one on the printer, the colors so screwed up, it gives me a headache.
Since we're fairly new to the digital scene, we're not sure what to do about this.
Any ideas would be very helpful!
Thanks so much!
Rees

Use the spider and calibrate both monitors. The colors might look weird for the first while because you aren't used to them, but calibrate and work on it for a day or two and you won't even notice it the difference.

http://www.haskinsphotography.com/blog/ind...k=18&cat=10

Thanks for the help, guys!

I really appreciate the feedback I recieved about this. Thanks again.

Here's my problem. The monitor on the printer upstairs cannot be calibrated because, right now, it matches the prints. If we calibrate it, it will no longer match the prints, thus defeating the purpose. The second issue is that the monitor on the printer is CRT and mine is LCD.

I'm not sure where to start in the process of fixing this problem, but I hope to have somewhere to turn before my wedding season kicks off next month.

wait you are printing wedding prints at home? what kind of printer is it?


a. you need to profile your monitors, no matter WHAT the printer looks like. that's the first step. step two is profiling your printer to mach your monitors, not the other way around.

b. maybe start looking for a lab that professionally prints and manages their color? like whcc. printing at home for weddings seems way counterproductive.

Just to clarify, I'm not printing at home. The company I work for is also a full service photofinishing lab. As I mentioned, the monitor that is attatched to the printer cannot be calibrated. That is done within the Noritsu printing software so that the monitor accurately portrays the output.
Thanks anyway to everyone that offered advice.
Rees

what points does your company calibrate to? industry standard is 6500K and 2.2 gamma, are you calibrating to those points using your spyder?

Yes.

I calibrated to those points using the Spyder2Express and my colors don't look like what I got from WHCC. True life pinks look purple, yet my blues are flat and look too green and washed out. My other monitors in the house look pretty close to my WHCC prints so I have been using those, but when I tried the Spyder2Express on my newest laptop LCD, the results were not so hot. Going to try the calibration once more and hope for a better result, but I still am looking to get my screen closer to accurate.

from my understanding, spyder2pro results will be much better than spyder2express...

It's not the results, is the array of options to tweak; ie., gamma, white balance, color temp, etc. Unless you work across different color space profiles for different outputs, then the Spyder2 would def be the way to go. For a constant working color space the Spyder works great.

Let me threadjack here for a moment (don't worry Tammi, your title is safe).

I am using a PC (ok, I have a macbook too) with two 19 acer widescreens. Same make and model.

I have gone from the huey pro, which worked colors ok, but did not do luminocity to well, everything came back a little dark, to the eye one display 2, which made the monitors synch up for color and I got most things back from pro labs as I expected them, but not always, even when soft proofing in their profiles in CS3. I now tried the Color Munki so I could see if I could get my little consumer Epson RX580 and C260 to match. I do not sell things printed on them, but they are good for me personally and for interim layout and proofing.
I am using Epson ink, although I have a brand new CIS I wil install once this last batch of cartriges are used up.

To anyone thinking about the color munki.....
I can not get the two monitors to look the same for the life of me. I have profiled them one right after the other in the exact same lighting conditions.

Profiling the printer...I used inkpress luster, a paper I am happy with, and the profiles are ok...not stunning. I was hoping to make custom profiles to use handmade papers, (think Michaels, not my blender and a sqeegee screen) etc. As it stands, I have asked the store to take the return. $450ish foolishly spent. And it is a memory hog, two items in the system tray each taking up 15000k of memory when I do not have the program open.

To those who are considering it...wait until the have the software right. "cause it needs to get better.

Also...softproofing. It took me a while to understand that what I see on my screen may not be able to be produced on paper, either by my own printer or by a lab. Different colorspaces and the way a screen shows an image versus light reflecting off a paper image.


I now return you to your original thread, already in progress: