Adjusting brightness for printing

Soldato
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I think this is probably because monitors are backlit, anyway when viewing an image on a calibrated monitor I'm happy with my images. If I print the same image it will always be a bit darker and lose some of the detail in the darker areas of the image

For example, the area under the closest tower you can see some of the foliage lit by the sun, you can't see as much of it on the print (still an acceptable amount though)

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Now I'm wanting to print this image, which is quite a bit darker, again it looks fine on my calibrated screen (ok it could be a bit lighter but then I'd lose the contrast which I don't want), but I'm concerned about the loss of detail I might get if I print it

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So do you guys brighten your images before you send them off for printing?
 
That photo will print very badly. Most of the colours are wayy out of gamut and the blacks are far too dark.

Only the bit's that are neutral grey contain good colours and contrast in this overlay...

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Softproof with CS and you'll probably notice that only the best papers will look good with this much contrast going on.

Take V-specs photos and you'll notice that theres no luminoisity clipping and just a teeny weeny bit of colour clipping (due to converting to sRGB I guess?), I think thats what you ought to aim for when printing colour photos. A little clipping, but not too much.
 
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Is this what you mean by softproofing?

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And yes it does look a fair bit flatter with that profile selected. Can I not just boost the contrast again? Or is that not the point?
 
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I'll write up a little softproof/print guide when I get back if you like. The brightness difference you're seeing is partly to do with the print being reflective light, but also because even calibrated I'm betting your monitor is still too bright (120cdm2?).
 
Just did a little experiment, the top image has the fuji glossy paper profile loaded and I've adjusted it to how I want it to look. The bottom image is the original with no the default colour profile. Interesting! Am I getting it? :p

experimentq.jpg
 
Try Harman Gloss paper (made for giclee prints)...

Turn on the Gamut warning [Shift+CTRL+Y] and compare Harman Gloss (bottom) and Fuji Gloss (top).

It should accomodate the range of tones better.

When soft proofing, uncheck preserve RGB. Then tick "black point compensation" and leave "simulate paper type" & "simulate black ink" turned off. Choose perceptual to keep the shadow details in, or relative colournmetric to keep the exact colours and tones but you'll loose more shadow detail.

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Then when you send your image to the printers convert it to the profiles using the well named "convert to profile".

Messiah Khan could probably give you more advice...
 
When soft proofing, uncheck preserve RGB. Then tick "black point compensation" and leave "simulate paper type" & "simulate black ink" turned off. Choose perceptual to keep the shadow details in, or relative colournmetric to keep the exact colours and tones but you'll loose more shadow detail.

First bit correct enough, second bit not so. The rendering intents are about remapping the entire gamut of colours to a new gamut, not specifically about shadow detail. The only two intents you need worry about are Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric and the difference is thus,

Perceptual will remap ALL the colours to the new gamut keeping roughly the same percentage difference between tones. So say you have an out of gamut red and an in-gamut red, it will shift BOTH inward (if moving to a smaller gamut) until the out of gamut red is in-gamut - but it will shift the original in-gamut red further in to keep the same difference. The clue is in the name, it will move all colours, but should remain perceptibly similar.

Relative Colorimetric will only remap the out of gamut colours. Anything that is in gamut will remain exactly as is. Sometimes pictures only have a few rogue out of gamut colours which just need clipping in to fit the print gamut, in which case it's generally a good way of maintaining colour accuracy across the majority of the image with just the few out of gamut areas reduced to the limit. It doesn't work so well if lots is far out of gamut, because then it's clipping larger areas down to the gamut limit - This can result in nice graduations that were all out of gamut just being crushed to one tone.

If in doubt I go with Perceptual :)

You have the right idea in having a file duplicate tiled next to your original with the dupe having the softproof enabled. Then you can adjust the image to best match the original RGB file within the new gamut.

Oh and you can use the 'Simulate Paper Color' and 'Simulate black ink' option providing you have NO other on-screen elements (Checking the first will result in the latter automatically being selected and greyed out - you should have both on if you're doing this). This tries to simulate the paper contrast ratio on your monitor (paper very low, monitor much higher) so will look rubbish if there are other high contrast elements (panels, tabs, etc) to compare with. Cycle F to get your full black screen view and hit Tab to remove the toolbars. Close your eyes and hit CTRL + Y to enable the softproof and adjust to the new image. You obviously can't do any adjustments when this is enabled, however.

Of course this is all largely pointless if your monitor is still too bright or your print viewing conditions are too dark. So sorting your screen/ambient luminance first will likely result in much better screen to print matches before anything else :)
 
Of course this is all largely pointless if your monitor is still too bright or your print viewing conditions are too dark. So sorting your screen/ambient luminance first will likely result in much better screen to print matches before anything else :)

Agreed. I don't have much time before I have to go to work, but when you say your monitor is calibrated, calibrated to what? When you calibrate a monitor, you calibrate it to a target. Generally the default target is 6500k 120cdm2. This might work for you, but for print it is generally way too bright. Try going for 100cdm2 or even 80cdm2. Depending on your calibrator and viewing conditions, you could try taking a reflectance light reading from the paper under the viewing light, then take this reading and feed it back in as the calibration target for the monitor calibration. This only really works accurately if you have a consistent viewing condition, ie if you use a calibrated viewing booth.

Other than that, what the othes have said is all good advice. Softproofing the paper profile you are going to be printing on can really help get the best out of a print. But be carefull using random paper profiles as things like the gamut and paper white of different papers varies hugely! For example a gloss or lustre paper will generally give you much better black levels and contrast than a matte or rag paper.
 
Agreed. I don't have much time before I have to go to work, but when you say your monitor is calibrated, calibrated to what? When you calibrate a monitor, you calibrate it to a target. Generally the default target is 6500k 120cdm2. This might work for you, but for print it is generally way too bright. Try going for 100cdm2 or even 80cdm2. Depending on your calibrator and viewing conditions, you could try taking a reflectance light reading from the paper under the viewing light, then take this reading and feed it back in as the calibration target for the monitor calibration. This only really works accurately if you have a consistent viewing condition, ie if you use a calibrated viewing booth.

Just to add a word of caution to this - 120cdm2 is a good general target for consumer monitors because it's easily enough achieved without any major side effects. Going down to say 80cdm2 though, unless your monitor is specifically designed for such a target and incorporates high bit level correction this can have a detrimental impact on image quality. Many backlights won't go this low so the monitor will have to pixel block to get the emitted luminance down. It may not even be able to achieve it at all.

Try dropping in 10cdm2 increments until you hit a wall or 80cdm2 - it may go no lower or may start to pixel block so much you loose contrast and general IQ.

I recommend you should always work in a very dim to dark room also. Because it standardises the ambient light for editing and removes another variable.View your prints just by an open window with no direct sunlight if you don't have a proper viewing booth.
 
Right first of all, I have no idea what 120cdm2 means or even how to adjust it.

When I say calibrated I mean I've used my Spyder 2 express and that's it.

Thanks for the detailed response guys, even if a lot of it goes over my head :p
 

Very good point. A lot of cheaper monitors won't even go low enough. The standard PC monitors we have here at work are crazy bright. Even on the lowest brightness setting they are kicking out close to 120cdm2. So yeah, to get true accuracy a decent monitor is useful.

Right first of all, I have no idea what 120cdm2 means or even how to adjust it.

When I say calibrated I mean I've used my Spyder 2 express and that's it.

Thanks for the detailed response guys, even if a lot of it goes over my head :p

Hehe. Colour management is a black art and can seem confusing, but take you time and do lots of reading and it will start to make sense. 120cdm2 refers to the brightness of your monitor. It actually means candela per square metre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela_per_square_metre). As Adrianr mentions, 120cdm2 is the 'standard' brightness of a calibrated monitor as it is easy to achieve with most monitors hardware. However it is brighter than the general viewing conditions of a print.

So to match the print you need to recalibrate you monitor and tell it to calibrate it to 80-100cdm2 (I have never used a spyder 2 so I don't know if the hardware or software will allow you to do this. Try recalibrating it and check any advanced settings etc). The thing with calibration is that it calibrates it to a 'target'. This is generally 6500k, 120cdm2 which is ok if you are viewing it under bright northern hemisphere daylight, but if you have more specific viewing conditions you need to tell the calibrator what you want it calibrating to. So unfortunately with calibration there is no magic button that makes everything match perfectly. You need to understand your viewing conditions or what you are trying to match and calibrate your monitor to suit. :)
 
I wanted to get a contact sheet printed off for sending to magazines and what have you so I sent this off to print

indexsheet.jpg


Now I purposefully modified the images to match the Fuji Glossy colour profile that photobox use to print with, this is direct from their website

You can soft proof your images in the following way:

1. Install the profiles on Photoshop
2. Before you upload your photos convert them to the profile
3. Open the image in Photoshop and discard any other profile in the image if it has one
4. Go to View / Proof Setup / Custom
5. From the drop-down list select the Fuji paper profile
6. Select 'preserve colour numbers' (this will show the image as it is presently printed)
7. Click OK
8. Make the required adjustments to the image so that the on-screen image appears as you want it printed
9. Save this new version of the image as a new file (keeping your original with it's original settings) and upload it for printing. Once these new versions have uploaded, the prints from them will be a close match to what you see on-screen

Only the printed output I've received looks like it does when I have it open in photoshop without the Fuji glossy proof enabled? I'm confused!
 
Step 6 instructs you to 'Preserve colour numbers', by which I presume it actually means 'Preserve RGB numbers'. This is what you check to see how an image would print if sent to a device with no colour management - pretty much just a straight translation. Bit more usefull for CMYK to CMYK conversions. Yet they're asking you to convert the file to the printer profile which would indicate they employ some sort of colour management during printing.

How does the soft proof look if you disable 'Preserve RGB numbers' and use either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric rendering intent with black point compensation on? Is that closer or is the non-softproofed original sRGB (Or AdobeRGB?) still closer? If the former then good, if the latter then the monitor is likely displaying the wrong information and the match is purely one of luck. 6500K 2.2 gamma and 120cd/m2 shouldn't look like a print coming out of a Frontier straight off the bat!

With regards to printing the original image in the OP, I'm now back on my reference monitor and can tell you it's VERY dark. I'm not surprised it came back with very little shadow detail - The whole lower left corner is very overwhelmingly black, the left side of the rocks having particularly little detail. Are you still having problems with the luminance difference or have you compensated for that now?
 
I'm not particularly looking for a huge amount of detail in the rocks, so long as some detail comes out so you know what you're looking at then that's fine. The important part of the image is in the bridge the sky and partly the buildings.

I'd be happy with the same amount of detail as can be seen in the top image of post #6.

Actually doing what you said above it looks pretty much bang on with 'preserve rgb numbers' disabled, 'black point compensation' enabled and perceptual rendering selected.
 
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Unfortunately it's pretty hard for me to guess what level of detail you're looking for as per a picture posted on here, because our monitors will be displaying it differently.

Also remember how you're viewing your prints will make a difference. Are you viewing them by a window with no direct sunlight? Or in the lights of the room the computer is in? If you also have a glossy monitor that can throw more variables into the works.

Glad to hear the softproofing now works at least. You may find it helpfull if the prints are still looking a touch on the dark side to also apply a slight drop curve adjustment to emulate the additional darkness on screen, rather than recalibrate to a new luminance target. Either that or send them with a slight curve bump to try and negate the darkness. Would look a little hot on screen but could print better. You could even make it into a little DSCL print-prep action for consistency.

Edit: If you're unsure I could mark-up a file as per I'm seeing it here. Just circling the black areas with little to no detail, if it would help.
 
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