Printing question
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Members of the SCF: hail.
Okay. Here goes. I've calibrated my monitor today using a Pantone Huey Pro. An ICC profile for my monitor was made. I've embedded the profile in a series of images I want to have printed.
Does such a profile contain all the info the print shop needs to ensure my images don't come out too green/dark/pink/what-evah?
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YUOR imafes too courful?
(Joking aside; sorry but no clue)
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Heh ... just want 'em to look like I intended.
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Could you just ask your print shop? they're probably the best people to tell you what they need to make your prints accurate
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lol. Good thinking, young master Remus! I'll give them a ring tomorrow. -
In my experience you could have the chief of the technical department from Pantone and the entire development team of Adobe come round, calibrate your monitor, set up your colour space correctly, take you eyeballs out, give 'em a good clean and still, when you send the stuff to the printers they'll screw it up.... and then blame you. In terms of the reliability of printing firms to reproduce what you know to be correct I rate them only somewhere slightly above the reliability of real estate agents. Half of them don't even understand the difference between dpi and pixels.
Example- images I produced for a glossy luxury home catalogue were sent back 3 times by the printing firm saying that they were printing too dark and with a green hue. Despite my repeated protests that our monitors were calibrated correctly, they insisted that it was our problem. After 3 sets of adjustments they were finally content with the by-now weird washed out pinkish images.
A few months later I saw the catalogues.... my images looked ok (but lacked colour range IMO). Every other image in the catalogue (mostly very expensive professional photoshoots with models on location, etc, etc) was dark with a green tinge. It looked like cr*p.
I guess the photographer had stuck to his guns, correctly insisted that his setup was 100% accurate and that it was the printers who had the problem so they just printed them as they were. Ridiculous. -
Stinkie, its worth noting that your prints are unlikely to come out exactly as you see them on your screen beacuse of the RGB->CMYK ocnversion: http://www.printernational.org/rgb-versus-cmyk.php
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Thanks for the input, gentlemen. Guess it's a bit of a lottery, eh? Might as well do it myself, it seems. I've done a few yesterday, and those were almost correct. I was fairly pleased with them - which is probably as good as it gets for someone as anal as yours truly. If I do my own printing, there's the added bonus of being able to take corrective measures in the midst of the process. Which, obviously, is a good thing. One needs to be able to exercise control.
If you'll excuse me, I have to go spend what's left of my savings on ludicrously expensive Canon printing paper.
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I've never used Canon's inkjet paper, but I can very highly recommend Ilford Photo's range of inkjet papers. They've been making professional film and photographic paper for over 100 years and their experience and technical knowledge really showed when they entered the inkjet paper market. They print beautifully, feel just like photos even after printing (unlike most "photo" inkjet paper with that awful tacky surface which apart from feeling horrible also sticks to glass frames), are extremely colour fast and ink doesn't transfer from one sheet to another (I recently found a few A4s I printed almost 10 years ago in an envelope under a pile of paperwork and there was no transfer or adhesion at all between them). Makes HP and Epson's "photo" paper look like newspaper and feel like flypaper!
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Hmm ... Sounds good. I'll get me some. Thanks for the tip.
Edit: Oh ... anyone got any experience with those - to my pauperish standards - fairly expensive Epson printers? (http://nl.backoffice.be/shop/information.asp?partid=C11CA16305) They worth it?
Edit2: just saw that Ilford's got a whole range of ICC profiles on their site. I just gotta try the one for the cheap printer I got now (Pixma iP4200) with some of their paper. Might turn out okay. Great tip, Jackson.
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