Colour management - ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[Syd]

This is not the 1st time I have had this headache. It happens most times I reinstall windows, and it is one of the most frustrating issues of computing and photography IMO

I have a decent PC, a decent monitor, lightroom4, a decent printer (Epson r2880) and a Spyder 3 pro - but can I get a decent print ATM can I heck !!!!!! Right now everything is washed out and heavily pink - I can't get reds or yellows, and I have tried messing with just about every colour management setting I can find ICRC profiles, you Anne it. I've had it all working before, but I cannot get it working now. I have cleaned the heads, changed 2 cartridges that were almost empty, but no change

Please please can someone help as I am close to throwing the whole damn lot in the skip and taking my memory card to Jessops................

[TheAnimus]

What is the ambient lighting in the room? That can often confuse the calibration!

Do you have any known images, that you can look at on screen to ensure you've got that bit right?

If you've not got your screen showing correctly, there is no point looking at the printing, divide and conquer!

[rox0r]

Good luck taking it to Jessops.....

[Bobster]

clear all colour management you have controlled on the printer and what do you get?

[Syd]

Good luck taking it to Jessops.....

Sorry, I was just practicing a little irony.........

[Syd]

Hi Bob, thanks for the response

Forgive me for asking the flippin' obvious, but what do I need to clear (Windows 7/Lightroom 4) to acheive this?

[TheAnimus]

Hi Bob, thanks for the response

Forgive me for asking the flippin' obvious, but what do I need to clear (Windows 7/Lightroom 4) to acheive this?

If you press start, then type "Colour Management" you should find the settings panel listed.

Every device that outputs colour has a calibration profile. You can flick them to "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" that is the 'normal' one.

Colour spaces are really interesting actually. People like to think of simple RGB or CYMK values, but its waaay more interesting than that. http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...perception.htm If you look at how the cone cells effective range is distributed over the spectrum, the sensitivity to blue is waaay off compared to the Red and Green. (RG colour blindness is much more common).

The simple fact that most screens have differen't luminisoity at say 50%, have a differen't idea on the colour of the filter for Blue.

Colour calibrations are used to try and accommodate this.

But they involve dragging everything down to a base line. The most common is sRGB. Myself I prefer aRGB, but thats probably a function of me.

But flicking everything to sRGB should be fairly straight forward IIRC, Lightroom uses the windows defaults for rendering on screen, and uses them for printing unless you've overridden it there.

But when it comes to printing, I find my R2880 does need paper profiles for a lot of non-epson paper (say ilford). If you have some handy, try some of their 7x5 premium photo, with the only calibration selected as epson photo paper.

The out of the box calibrations should be fairly good, a badly applied calibration can make it much worse.

I would also suggest if possible using the screen calibrator in a dark environment. I've found that halogen lights can mess it up.

[Bobster]

i wouldn't touch that part - if you're happy with the calibration that the Spyder software has given you, leave it

i'm talking about when you print.. are you letting the colours be managed by the printer, or are you using a custom profile?

[Syd]

i wouldn't touch that part - if you're happy with the calibration that the Spyder software has given you, leave it

i'm talking about when you print.. are you letting the colours be managed by the printer, or are you using a custom profile?

Snyder calibration is great, and lr4 is set in the print module to let printer manage colours, in fact it does not matter if I set it to managed b printer or managed by anything else, I get the same result

I'm guessing the 1st thing I need to do is reset the whole shooting match to default, but I don't know how many colour space options there are !

One thing I wasn't sure of is that right under the section in lr where you can set the colour space to managed by printer it suggests to select the same in the printer driver settings. Well I can confidently say that I can't find that option no matter how hard I look......,,,,,

[Bobster]

what happens if you print directly though windows?

[Syd]

what happens if you print directly though windows?

Colours still wrong, reds are pink and black is washed out

[Bobster]

Photo Enhance on or off?

have you tried turning any colour profiling off in the print settings?

[oldboy47]

Syd, one thought, what paper are you printing on - this can materially affect your results.

I use HP printers but I leave the print management to the photo software (Photoshop) as it was more consistent and for good prints I use either 'Briiliant' paper (from most good photo suppliers) or Fuji paper. I tried every available quality with both HP and Epson as well as Kodak etc. and never found the results satisfactory.