Dandelion

[Mike Farley]

The image appearance compared to the digital version is one thing that is currently confusing me - I have a colour managed, brightness balanced monitor calibrated every couple of weeks and using printer profiles supplied by the paper manufacturer using printed examples I sent to them. So it's as accurate as it possibly can be... yet STILL something isn't coming out quite right!

OK, you are definitely on the right lines in what you are doing. Other than images coming out too dark, are there any other issues such as colours being inaccurate?

[davidc]

Not that I can see. The colour prints I've done all seem to be spot on in terms of brightness and colour rendition, it's just last night's mono images in particular that seem to be out of whack. Time to experiment I think.

[Mike Farley]

It might just be as simple as turning the monitor down a notch. Anything above a setting of 50% is almost certainly too bright. If you adjust the monitor, you will need to recalibrate it afterwards. As you say, it is time for some experimentation to get everything right.

One further difference between print and screen which I did not mention earlier is that monitors are limited to displaying sRGB, whereas most printer and paper combinations are capable of rendering closer to the larger Adobe RGB colour space. If you want to get a better feel for how your images really look, then you will need a monitor which is capable of displaying the wider colour gamut. The good news is that these monitors used to cost around £6k when they were first introduced but have since reduced substantially in price. The bad news is that they are still very expensive and about the cheapest you will currently find is the model shown at the link.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/NEC-MultiSync-PA241W-inch-Monitor/dp/B0038VEROI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1351159729&sr=8-3

[Mike Farley]

One further thought about monitor calibration. Monitors need to have been running continuously for 30 minutes to an hour to ensure that they are fully warmed up before being calibrated to ensure that the measurement takes place based on normal brightness levels. Similarly, the monitor should have been turned on for a similar period before commencing any critical work. If you have any power saving options set which turn the monitor off when the computer has not been used for a certain period, these should be disabled in these situations.