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by Paul Burgess on Mon Sep 23, 2013 4:55 pm
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Hi all,

I'm new to monitor calibration, and I'm having some trouble. I can't seem to pick the right settings to make my monitor match my prints (samples from WHCC). I'm using a ColorMunki Display, have tried all sorts of settings, and am currently calibrated to D50, 100 cd/m2, with a Tone Responsive Curve (gamma?) of 2.2, and using ICC profile version 4. I've set my Technology Type as RGB LED, and disabled ADC and the "Achieve display luminance value using video LUTs" setting. My monitor is a Dell 2408WFP.

The monitor is still brighter than the print (and/or has less contrast), and the colour isn't quite right. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for the help. If this has been discussed before, you can just point me to the thread.
Happy shooting and God bless,
Paul
www.EvolutionvsGod.com
 

by Trev on Mon Sep 23, 2013 5:20 pm
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You don't calibrate your monitor to match your prints its the other way around. Your brightness and gamma are fine. You must use icc profiles for your printing and depending on the paper you use will depend on the Dmax. You should also soft proof your images before printing to make any slight changes for the best results. Remember a monitor is back lit and a print relies on reflected light also a monitor can show more contrast than a print as the blacks aren't as deep on paper this also varies from paper to paper.
Hope this helps.
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by E.J. Peiker on Tue Sep 24, 2013 5:07 pm
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Your monitor should be set to D65 - that will likely solve the color. As for brightness, monitors look braighter since it's transmitted light compared to reflected light on the print. The print would have to be used in light that is similarly bright to make a valid comparison. In otherwords under your light, a plain piece of the paper that you are printing should be approximately as bright as the monitor to make a fair brightness comparison - most rooms are not as bright so don't get confused by that.
 

by ronzie on Sat Sep 28, 2013 2:04 am
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Not all systems handle a V4 profile especially for printing and applications with soft proofing. I have a Color Munki Photo and had to set the default profile versions to V2 in preferences.

The V4 profile was causing Corel Paintshop Pro X3 to crash on a soft proof using a V4 icc profile. (I no longer use CPP but have not tried V4 profiles in Photoshop Elements out of caution.)

In clarification what Trev stated monitors are active additive color devices because the RGB pixel elements are adjacent. This page has a typical LCD monitor pixel layout image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD

In contrast, offset and inkjet printers use inks in layers as overlays where the light is passed from the surface to the reflective substrate through all layers and back to the viewer as subtractive color just like filters on a camera lens. The subtractive color primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Your typical printer driver converts the RGB composed image to CMY for the ink depositing driver.)

The idea behind color management is that the monitor is profile corrected to a standard and the printer is profile corrected to the same standard so that in soft proofing in theory what you see on the monitor will match the printout.

Neither monitor or printer environments are pure so you will not get a 100 percent match but can get very close.

In soft proofing and in printing you may have an application setting to use perceptual, relative color metric, or absolute color metric. This has to do with the spectrum capability of the printer in fitting the specified color space of the spectrum standard chosen.

If I get this correctly, perceptual allows some color distortion but prints to the intent because the printer can not saturate all of the primaries as required. Relative intent  reduces all color saturation to the maximum allowed so the hues match the input. Absolute color metric reduces the primary saturation to the original but can look a bit washed out. Depending on the image and printer capabilities try Perceptual and Relative intents for the best image.

The printer profile also can contain a luminance curve as does the monitor. This has to do with the luminance (brightness, contrast, gamma) matching of the two devices as best as possible to the standard gray scale. In the calibration report image of the hues you may have an option to display the black or luminance curve on top of the device limits measured. This shows any color shift as luminance varies.

Your setting of 90 to 110 cd/m^2 for monitor brightness tends to work best for the transmissive differences of the monitor and print matching estimations.

There are also some departures from using the D65 color temperature white point setting used by some. If a print is to hang in a gallery and the color temperature of the illumination is known, then a compromising white point may be used instead of the reference "open sky daylight" D65. I have a near D65 lamp with a spectrum spread index (CDI) of above 93% so I use a white temperature of D65. Within wide limits, the viewer perception will adjust automatically to the difference in viewing light so most stick with D65. It is the psychology of human viewing.

Probably bored by all of this but I find it helps to understand the underlying concepts to help in applying the proper procedure.
 

by Royce Howland on Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:05 am
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Paul Burgess wrote:[...] I'm using a ColorMunki Display, have tried all sorts of settings, and am currently calibrated to D50, 100 cd/m2, with a Tone Responsive Curve (gamma?) of 2.2, and using ICC profile version 4. I've set my Technology Type as RGB LED, and disabled ADC and the "Achieve display luminance value using video LUTs" setting. My monitor is a Dell 2408WFP.
As noted by others, I'd recommend setting your target color temperature to D65, not D50. There are specific reasons to use D50 (or something else) but as ronzie says these are related to have very specific known lighting conditions that you're targeting for print matching. In the general case, I recommend D65 for monitors.

I'd also recommend ICC version 2 profiles, not version 4, for the reason of improved compatibility. v4 profiles have some advantages but unfortunately there are a lot of fatal and/or more subtle issues using them in various software apps. Unless you know everything you're dealing with supports v4, then v2 is a safer choice.

I don't have the ColorMunki Display for testing, so I'm not familiar with its software. But the setting you describe "achieve display luminance value using video LUTs" doesn't sound like something that should be used. Display luminance should be set by you manually adjusting the monitor brightness during the calibration run of the software, not by the software digitally programming in a reduced luminance via the video card. Lots of technical reasons for that, related to the video pipeline only being an 8-bit digital process and if you reduce luminance that way you're probably losing a lot of tonal resolution in your display. Better to use the monitor's own native brightness control to reduce luminance so the video card still has all 8 bits worth of tonal resolution to work with.
The monitor is still brighter than the print (and/or has less contrast), and the colour isn't quite right. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for the help. If this has been discussed before, you can just point me to the thread.
There are many threads discussing this topic, but wading through all of them may or may not be beneficial to you in specific terms. But you might get some helpful general background if you review a few of them. Just search the forum archives for terms like "display print matching". If I have time later today, I'll search out a few better threads and post links to them.

Unfortunately screen-to-print matching is an involved topic and there aren't just one or two simple software settings that make it all work. If you reprofile your display as this thread has indicated, I'd recommend following up with specific issues or questions that you see in your screen-to-print matching and we can discuss from there.
Royce Howland
 

by Paul Burgess on Fri Oct 04, 2013 4:27 pm
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Thanks for the info guys! I've re-calibrated the monitor with v2 and D65, and it's getting better. 

One thing that I found was possibly wrong was my Proof Setup settings in photoshop. Changing that can really change the colour you see. How do you determine which setting to use? Whichever's closest to your print? Some prints look better with one setting, some with another. 

I'm using White House Custom Color to print, so I can't adjust the printer at all, but they do tell you what colour profile to embed in the the photo. They also suggest setting your "Color settings" similarly—sRGB IEC61966-2.1—which I've done. 

Thanks again,
Happy shooting and God bless,
Paul
www.EvolutionvsGod.com
 

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