Custom Profile printing dark

I just got a custom profile made for one of my papers for a Canon iPF 5100. The colors are very accurate compared to what I see on the screen, but the prints are coming out about 1/2 stop or so dark compared to the screen. I've tried recalibrating, but they are the same. Using the Photoshop plugin for printing I have resorted to adding +10 to the brightness in color correction and they look pretty accurate now. Is this the best way to deal with this when printing or is there some better way to adjust things so I don't have to make any adjustments when printing?

What is the luminance level of your monitor? If it isn't between 90 and 100 cd/m2 your prints will look dark compared to the monitor. Also remember that you are looking at transmitted light on the monitor vs reflected light on the print which is always darker.

Also, under what kind of lighting are you examining the prints -- placing them more or less next to your monitor in your post-processing / work space? If your monitor's brightness is calibrated close to the ideal of 90 - 100 cd/m2, then it may mean your ambient light is dimmer than the "reference lighting" that's presumed by the standard calibration targets for screen & printer. As E.J. says, the print can only reflect light... if the ambient light is dim, then the print will look correspondingly dim.

Those are the 2 primary reasons why people find their prints look darker than the image on screen: 1) monitor is too bright; 2) print viewing light is too dark. Or a combination of both.

Having said all that, if there is a disparity between monitor & print brightness, and for some reason you can't really change it, then yes -- make a systematic bump to the image brightness when preparing your print master files.

Thanks for the response EJ and Royce.
I'm doing my calibrating with a i1 (2) display LT which doesn't give me the option to check any luminance values.....just contrast. I'm at 100 % contrast and have arbitrarily set the brightness to 30% comparing what I see on the screen on my website to other screens as a rough comparison to make sure they look similar in brightness. The Display is a HP LP2465. Just out of curiosity I brought up the image in Photoshop and soft proofed it with my paper and dropped the brightness on the monitor down to 0%....it still does not get down to the level of the print for darkness but just gets muddy looking on the display. Yes my viewing area is a bit dark as well Royce.

If I'm not affecting colors by bumping the brightness in the Plugin and I know its a set amount it's probably the easist way to deal with this? When I add this brightness in the printer driver color settings is this affecting the profile in any other way besides adding brightness?

As an aside when I create monitor profile and use it as my display profile withing Photoshop what rendering intent does one use or do you click the "preserve RGB values" box?

John, the HP LP2465 is a pretty bright monitor. It calibrates well in most cases that I've seen, but its optimum calibrated brightness I've found in the past to be somewhere around 120 - 140 cd/m2. This is definitely higher than the rule of thumb for ideal monitor luminance, 90 - 100 cd/m2. Of course if the i1 Display LT software isn't letting you set the target luminance, and doesn't tell you what luminance it measured at the end of the run, then you're working a bit in the dark... no pun intended. So you might still be brighter yet, at 30% on the on-screen brightness control... it's hard to say.

If your room is a bit dark as well, then you've got both of the most common factors against you in terms of getting good screen-to-print matching.

Here's a trick you can try. Put your system into its normal, calibrated & profiled state (30% brightness and whatever else you normally set). Bring up PS and create a new blank image, filled with pure white (255,255,255). Expand it to fill the full screen. Now take a sheet of your chosen printer paper and hold it beside the monitor. Compare the 2 whites visually -- is the monitor brighter than the paper? I'm betting it is, probably by a fair margin. Then clearly your prints on that same paper, in that same ambient light, will look darker than images on your monitor at that same brightness setting.

If you want a metric on the level of brightness difference, prop up the paper beside the monitor and photograph them both in a single frame with your camera. (Remember to expose the histogram to the right.) Now open the file from your camera in PS and look at the Info palette RGB values as you mouse over the part showing the monitor white, vs. the part showing the paper white. The difference in RGB levels will give you some quantitative measure of how far apart the two white brightness levels are from each other.

To equalize things properly you need to reduce the monitor brightness and/or normalize the ambient lighting in your work room. Or at least get a decent print viewing light on a work table, where you can evaluate your prints better.

I don't know what the Canon print plugin is doing so I can't speak to the adjustments that might be made in there. Certainly making adjustments in the plugin isn't affecting the "profile"... it would simply adjust the image data before it's sent to the printer, but whether before or after the image data was converted through the printer profile, I can't say. Probably what I would try to do is not use adjustments in software if I couldn't really tell what it's doing. I'd do the adjustments in Photoshop, where I have control & insight over the change; or in some other software like Qimage where I could pretty reliably determine what the adjustment is doing.

I'm not quite following your final question. When you calibrate your monitor, the monitor profile is automatically picked up by Photoshop. You don't set it, and at no time are you setting a rendering intent for use with the monitor profile. If you're talking about setting up a custom soft proofing configuration for your monitor profile under the View > Proof Setup menu, there's no particular reason to do this. You don't need to soft proof how the image looks through your monitor profile -- you're already looking at it that way in PS all the time. For all normal soft proofing purposes (usually based on printer profiles), do not check the "preserve RGB values" box; that's not something you generally want to do.

Thanks for the indepth report Royce. I will give the paper thing a try tonite after I get home from work. It makes perfect sense. I guess I'm trying to compensate for not being all that bright by keeping my monitor on the bright side. This color management stuff is all pretty daunting for an old guy and the continous computer/software changes an endless learning curve. Some days I long for the film days again

As far as the monitor profile that shows up in my proof setup...I'm not sure how it got in there but I've alway chosen it right after I open PS. When I had a look at what it was built from it had the "preserve RGB numbers" clicked hence the question. From what you say I can just delete it and PS will automatically open with the default monitor profile that was created when I calibrated if I understand this correctly.

I'll give the paper thing a run tonite an report back...thanks again.

john wrote:[...] This color management stuff is all pretty daunting for an old guy and the continous computer/software changes an endless learning curve. Some days I long for the film days again

I never shot film, and sometimes I long for those days, too.

As far as the monitor profile that shows up in my proof setup...I'm not sure how it got in there but I've alway chosen it right after I open PS. When I had a look at what it was built from it had the "preserve RGB numbers" clicked hence the question. From what you say I can just delete it and PS will automatically open with the default monitor profile that was created when I calibrated if I understand this correctly.

Okay, you've probably had an issue for quite some time, based on this description. You absolutely do not need to activate soft proofing mode just to look at images for the purposes of doing all your normal editing on them. Soft proofing mode is entirely designed to support simulating how the image may look when produced on other output devices -- NOT your monitor -- such as printers. If you've had a soft proof configuration for your monitor set up with "preserve RGB numbers" checked, then this is a double problem. When getting back to normal settings, you may or may not find that your images now look a bit (or potentially a lot) "off" when viewed the way they should normally be viewed.

This situation could be contributing to some additional differences between how your screen and prints match. If you have some lingering questions about color management setup, it might be a good idea to go through the details blow-by-blow and make sure things are well in hand. Any flaw in CM settings can really wreak havoc with your ability to get good, consistent screen-to-print matching...

It's almost a given, if you aren't calibrating to a specific luminance target that the monitor is too bright. The 2465 is abut 120 cd/m2 at a setting of 20% brightness. The problem with setting it much lower than that is that you start to lose some color fidelity but I would try setting it to abut 15% and then calibrating as a good compromise. this should get you very close. I used this exact monitor for a couple of years.

Royce.... I tried your little experiment tonite and right you are. The monitor was fair bit brighter and after doing a measurment of ambient light in my room it also came out at 2600K which explains why the paper looks so warm compared to the screen. I'll have to get some different lighting in here to improve things.

As far as the monitor profile I've been using I must have got lucky because the pictures I have on my site seem to look OK (at least no one has complained so far ). The last thing I always do with the jpgs is convert them to sRGB so maybe that saved them by punching a bit of life back into the file. The Tiff's I'm processing for printing I always softproof with the paper profile so they should be OK as well. I'm still not sure how that monitor softproof got in there but it must have been passed down from previous PS versions when I was even more green at this than I now am. Anyway its gone now and thanks for the advice and direction.

I'm just beginning to use this iPF 5100 printer a bit more now and its nice to get off on the right foot. I'm pretty amazed...I've owned this printer since 2007 and leave it turned off for months at a time and then print the odd image and have yet to have a clogged nozzle. I'm still on my first full set of inks after almost 5 years. My old epson clogged on a regular basis even though it saw constant use.

EJ..thanks for the tip. I remember you once had one of these monitors and was hoping you would pipe in on your settings. I did the recalibration and at 15 % brightness and I have to say they look pretty darn close now. The pictures on NSN look good as well so I think this might do the trick.

Thanks again to both of you for the help.

I have a NEC OEM version of the I1D2. The modified software has a preference for setting the white level in ft/candles. Since your I1 may not talk to your monitor to set brightness it still should provide a procedure to follow in setting brightness and contrast on your HP while giving you real-time illumination values.

The brightness control on a flat panel screen is adjusting the backlight illumination. Be sure in your graphics card setup that there is no reduction in white level there so avoid distorting the actual white chip backlight reading.

Out of the box monitors typically are set for a store lit demo value to put out 300 ft/candles.

Ronzie. Thanks for your input. There is no place that I can find that allows me to set brighness in this software.....only contrast and.
I'm honestly would have no idea were to look in the graphics card to make any adjustments. That's a bit over my head I think after following the advice given above I have it pretty close now. Thanks again.

One more time....

Here is a copy of the response I got from Eric Chan who built the profile. There are a couple of good tips in there if you can't measure brightness so thought I'd pass them along in case someones else has the same issues.

"The common cause of prints appearing significantly darker than the screen is due to a mismatch between print-viewing conditions and screen-viewing conditions.

For example, try holding up a blank (unprinted) sheet of your inkjet paper next to your display. On your computer, open up a blank white document (e.g., in Notepad, TextEdit, MS Word, or Photoshop). Most likely you will find that the "white" of the display is much brighter than the "white" of the paper. When you edit/adjust your images with your eyes adapted to the very bright white of your display, the result is that your images will appear nice on your screen, but appear very dark in the print.

In general, you may need to dim your display. I use and recommend about 100 cd/m2. If the ColorMunki does not provide an option to set a target luminance explicitly, you can still get in the ballpark fairly easily. With a digital camera set to spot meter, ISO 100, manual metering, 1/15 sec, f/8. Point your camera's meter at a blank white area of the display. Adjust the brightness of the display till the meter indicates in the "middle". (A manual light meter will work as well.)

The second thing you can do is edit your images with lots of white space around them. The default Lightroom configuration, for example, is to surround your images with dark or middle gray. This generally causes printed images to look too dark. This is because the printed edges of the paper are white, or they are viewed in a context where the surround is much brighter (e.g., white walls, white mats, etc.). You can change the background in LR to be White, instead of gray/black. To do that, right-click on the background area and choose White from the ensuing popup menu.

Once your screen is dimmed to an appropriate brightness, and you surround the on-screen image with White, you will find that your images on screen look rather dark. This will naturally lead you to edit/adjust your images on screen (i.e., by brightening/lightening them) till they look right. This in turn causes the resulting prints to come out lighter, in a way that better matches your on-screen output."

All good tips from Eric... Good print making is partly a technical thing, getting all the gear & software configured properly. But it also involves a big dose of examining our own perceptions and conditions of viewing images on the screen and on paper, so we can properly evaluate what we're seeing.

john wrote: I'm still not sure how that monitor softproof got in there but it must have been passed down from previous PS versions when I was even more green at this than I now am. Anyway its gone now and thanks for the advice and direction.

I had similar problems with my 5100, found I needed to tweak up the brightness, particularly in shadows a little in PS, no harm in doing that. I had ny monitor (an apple cinema dispaly) set at about 100 cD/m2.

When you say it's gone (the monitor profile), where did it go? assuming you just mean you selected a different profile to soft proof?

Hi Chris,
I must have at some point set up a softproof with the generated monitor profile when I calibrated. I can't ever remember doing it, but whenever I've opened PS since then I've alway made sure that profile was select in soft proofing. I now understand that it is not needed ( and for that matter was opening a profile that was generated eons ago so probably wasn't that accurate anyway ) and have deleted it out of the softproofing folder. I've got the brightness pretty close now following all the advice given, but every image is a bit different so the odd one still needs a tweak.

John - FWIW, I can confirm that the LT version of the i1 Match software does not let you set a luminance point. I'd follow E.J.'s suggestion and keep the brightness turned down a bit.

Thanks David!