Printing and soft proofing

Hi All,

I am new to printing. I got some test prints back from a lab. All of them have a slight blue cast to them.  My monitor is calibrated.  The icc profile from the lab is downloaded and I used it to look at a soft proofed image in Lightroom 4.  Should the soft proof look just like the actual print when I hold the print next to the monitor?  My prints look slightly bluer than the soft proofed image.  I am using a Mac if that matters.  Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?   Thanks.

JAL

The luminance might be different but they shouldn't look bluer at least not significantly so unless you are looking at the prints in an unusually blue light source. I'm guessing their profile isn't accurate to what they are printing and perhaps made that profile a long time ago and have changed some things or have a bad profile to begin with. Or your monitor profile could be bad too.

Soft-proofing is a simulation of the print shown on your screen, but how close it is to the way the print looks depends on several factors. Primarily it depends on how accurate the lab's printer profile is, how close their printer's colour gamut is to your monitor's gamut, and how good your ambient light is.

E.J. touched on several common issues. Your monitor profile could be a bit off (shifted towards yellow so you post-processed the file in a way that introduced more blue), or their printer profile could be a bit off (shifted towards blue), or both. Though in both cases you should see a colour shift on-screen during soft-proofing.

There could be other colour management issues even if both profiles are accurate and reasonably well matched to each other for soft-proofing purposes. For example the files you sent them might have been mis-processed during the printing process, not taking into account the proper colour space the files were tagged with. Or perhaps their actual printing process is not a particularly close match to the profile you downloaded from them.

You can diagnose profile issues like this with in a relatively straight forward way using a tool like Gamutvision (Windows only), which has been discussed extensively here in past threads...

As E.J. also noted, if the lighting under which you're viewing the prints is particularly blue then you could be seeing a bluish cast. This won't show up as a difference in soft-proofing because neither your monitor profile nor their printer profile would know anything about peculiarities of your ambient lighting.

EJ and Royce, thank you for your responses.

The response I got today from the lab was:
If the prints you received are bluer than your monitor then you would actually want to adjust the calibration as that would include that the calibration is off.

How do I do that?

JAL

Sounds like what they are saying is that [they think] your calibration is incorrect and this has affected how you edited your images (causing the images to be bluer than normal).

Yes, this is a standard response. "Can't be a problem on our end. If the prints don't match the monitor, your end must be off." I wouldn't mess with anything without first figuring out what the problem really is, and where it is. After that you can sort out how to fix it. We provided several possibilities above; the lab's response doesn't shed any light on anything and may in fact be misleading.

So you still need to diagnose the issue first... e.g. whether it is a monitor calibration issue, a printer calibration issue, and colour management configuration or printing process problem, an issue with your ambient lighting, etc.

As I noted, you can do a lot of investigation of what's going on with monitor and printer profiles using a tool like Gamutvision (Windows only, if you run a Windows environment on your Mac via Parallels, VMWare Fusion or similar)...

Royce and Doug,

Thank you for the help.