How best to adjust 'brightness' for printing?

[dpattinson]

I've just started printing shots from my M8 on an Epson R800 inkjet printer. I noticed that images that appear fine on my screen will print much darker. I expect some issues because my laptop screen is uncalibrated, but lacking a calibration device I need to sort out an effective approach to mitigating this.

What I'd like to know is the 'best' way to compensate for this in preparing an image for printing. I tried adding an exposure adjustment layer in CS3 and adding 1.25 gamma correction. Is that better for this purpose than just increasing overall exposure?

Thanks, David.

[ndjambrose]

The best way to compensate for it is to calibrate your display and printer. Anything else is just guess work. Not much point in owning a £3,000+ camera and getting bad prints for lack of a correct screen and printer profile - especially since you can get a decent profiler for under £60 :-)

[dpattinson]

OK, I know I can calibrate - I will be picking up a calibration device asap.

So to rephrase my question:

Is modifying gamma in CS an effective way of lightening an image for printing? Would I get a different or better result by adjusting exposure, or brightness or something else?

I know that I can just experiment, but if there is a better way then I'd love to find out before I waste a bunch of paper.

[Kent10D]

What you're seeing on your display is backlit. The brightest parts of the image can be very bright indeed (in fact, they are actually glowing).

What you see on paper is reflective, and the whiteness and brightness of what you see depends on the paper the image is printed on.

These are fundamentally different modes of viewing, and although calibrating your monitor can help a lot, there will always be a difference. It seems that a little bit of mental adjustment is required.

Also try looking at your printed images under different types of light: sunlight, fluorescent, tungsten. You'll probably find that the image looks quite different under each, throwing a whole new economy-size monkey wrench (or spanner) into the works.

This is tricky stuff.

[jaapv]

We're still waiting for a slide-projector quality beamer.
Film was no different - slides are far more brilliant than prints.

[Shootist]

It's real simple. Turn down the brightness on your monitor until it matches, or gets close to, the brightness of the print. This is especially true for LCD monitors. They always seem to be much brighter then CRT at there standard settings.

[Ariston]

Originally Posted by Kent10D

What you're seeing on your display is backlit. The brightest parts of the image can be very bright indeed (in fact, they are actually glowing).

What you see on paper is reflective, and the whiteness and brightness of what you see depends on the paper the image is printed on.

These are fundamentally different modes of viewing, and although calibrating your monitor can help a lot, there will always be a difference. It seems that a little bit of mental adjustment is required.

Also try looking at your printed images under different types of light: sunlight, fluorescent, tungsten. You'll probably find that the image looks quite different under each, throwing a whole new economy-size monkey wrench (or spanner) into the works.

This is tricky stuff.

Good advice and very well put. However, even with a regularly calibrated monitor and soft proofing using epson papers with the canned profiles, I always found my R1800 (which is more or less an A3 version of the R800) gave me significantly darker prints than expected. I usually just boosted the brightness a bit through a straightforward curves adjustment just prior to printing. I have recently upgraded to an Epson Pro 3800 and the Epson profiles for this printer are much, much better.

[dpattinson]

Originally Posted by jaapv

We're still waiting for a slide-projector quality beamer.
Film was no different - slides are far more brilliant than prints.

Hmmm, I think heard a rumor about something like that... projector that is.

[dpattinson]

Originally Posted by Ariston

Good advice and very well put. However, even with a regularly calibrated monitor and soft proofing using epson papers with the canned profiles, I always found my R1800 (which is more or less an A3 version of the R800) gave me significantly darker prints than expected. I usually just boosted the brightness a bit through a straightforward curves adjustment just prior to printing. I have recently upgraded to an Epson Pro 3800 and the Epson profiles for this printer are much, much better.

I'll have a play with a few different mechanisms then. It may be that there is no material difference in final image quality between playing with gamma vs. curves or exposure.

David.

[archi4]

I use iONE for calibrating both lcd monitor and eps 3800 printer.
To get matching result I must calibrate my monitor with a brighness of 80 to 90 which is waaay down. My results from screen to printer are practically perfect.
Therefore I agree with shootist that lowering the screen brightness is the best advice, eventually calibrating it with the software in the Mac or Adobe depending on your system.
maurice

[BerndReini]

Even after you calibrate your monitor and printer, you still have to take one important step: soft-proofing. In Photoshop, click on "view", choose "Proof Setup" "Custom". Under this menu, choose the profile of the paper you are printing on. Your image on the display should now look a lot muddier. The monitor is trying to imitate how the paper will interpret the image. Jeff Schewe calls this the "make everything look like shit button" in his print tutorial, which I highly recommend to you.

Then I usually add a layer curve adjustment and pull up the middle of the curve (low midtones) to get close to my original image before softproofing. But please do yourself a favor and buy the print tutorial from the luminous-landscape website. i am not affiliated with those guys, but I have been printing for quite some time and still found some good little tricks in this video.

For profiling, I recommend the "color munki." It is a new device that profiles both your monitor and your printer, and while some people argue that it doesn't use as many color patches as other devices, profiling both printer and monitor with the same device more than makes up for it in the end result.

[Shootist]

I must add that the OP never said his prints look different, as to color, but only darker then screen brightness. Calibration of the monitor will not help this as most all clibrators do not deal with brightness.
This has been posted on almost every website dealing with digital workflow and printing and using a LCD screen.
God I could of lit up my PC room with the monitor alone when I first started using LCD's, that's how bright they are by default compared to CRT monitors.

[Jamie Roberts]

Hey Ed--almost all the calibration tools deal with luminosity / brightness in my experience. But you are absolutely right about most LCD panels--they're incredibly contrasty and bright and bandy in the shadows, too I have an HP I use at shows and it's just disgusting how the colour shifts off-axis. I never use it, or a laptop, for colour critical work.

But you guys with laptops have issues anyway... it's very hard to profile and calibrate a laptop panel--they don't have the right video cards and they don't have the bit-depth capability for colour in their panel look-up-tables (LUTs).

The best advice for the laptop is "make it more or less as bright as your printed output, and pray"... or learn to adjust your prints by their RGB or CMYK values, and the profiling / calbration be damned, because if you know, say, that something is neutral in your output space, then it should print neutrally though it be green or polka dot on your monitor

[Shootist]

Jamie I know that the calibrators do work on luminosity / brightness to some degree but it has been my experience that almost all LCD panel need to have the brightness lowered even after they are calibrated. That is so what you see on screen matches prints as far a overall brightness.

[caparobertsan]

Hello, I would like to share my experience here, too.
I used to get super nice print without any effort(using Mac os9 +epson 680 printer).
But When I enter osx and Epson R800 printing colour and brightness does not match at all.

So I started asking and searching many people about printing method. And just recently I have manged to produce the print as I see on the LCD screen.

1: Calibrate Screen( I don`t think LCD screen on lap top is calibrate-able). But this is not as important, I think.

2: Buy paper with colour profiling support for your printer( I use Kodak professional and Iloford GALERIE).

3: I print using Photoshop.

4:Follow the print setting according to instruction come with profile file. Paper setting and colour setting. Print using photoshop manged colour and use its special profile for paper you use.
If paper without profile, I would print using printer managed colour.

I think this is not so clear for people who doesn`t know anything about it. But I hope this would help some.

[dpattinson]

Actually, I haven't managed to get 'Photoshop manages color' to work at all on my R800. I know that I need to turn off ICC, but I still get rubbish colors unless I allow the R800 to manage color.

Probably I'm doing something incorrectly, but as far as I can tell I'm managing to switch off printer color management in the driver, it just doesn't seem to have any effect.

If anyone could upload screenshots of the driver and print job setup for CS3 managed colors on Win-XP for an R800 that would be very fine indeed.