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My Picture prints too dark... Help!


K

karthur

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I just printed a portriat for a friend that I have been working on at Wally World. Pic is really, really dark. I have been reading and dark pics seem to be a common problem. I think my monitor is calibrated (or adjusted) from the test images I can find for the brightness test. I did not use any image adjustments at WM (printed from website actually and not kios).

My friend had the same pic printed at a different store and they turned out OK for her. (I havent seen them yet, but she says they are not dark at all).

Some suggestions I have read says to view the image in Photoshop in "Proof Mode" and use the profile for that printer the image will be printed with. In PS, when I go to View>Proof Mode, it is set to Working CMYK... Is this what it should be for "Normal" viewing??? Maybe I have changed this by accident.

If I change to "Monitor RGB" it gets closer to what I had printed by Wally World.

Maybe I need to find out what printer they are using and get the profile for it.

I am using a Acer X233H LCD flatscreen monitor (not a laptop). The specs says brightness for this is 300 CD/M^2. I have read where the brightness should be 100-120 CD/M^2 for photo editing. I am at 50% from the monitor setup menu, so that would put me at 150CD/m^2 (or approximately).

TIA,
Kirk
 
I had the same problem and couldnt find a solution that worked. In the end I ended up using canon's own photo printing software with my canon inkjet which gives me satisfactory results. From the little I do know about printing you should be in rgb mode instead of cmyk, cmyk is used when you need to get something printed by a printer.. magazines, brochures etc. There are some clever people on this forum so hopefully they can help you (and me) out more.
 
Did some more "testing" tonight, but no luck so far.It seems to be an issue with walmarts photo center. When I upload my image and then look at the preivew on their site, it looks NOTHING like my original jpg.

In PS, I export to jpg. When I preview that, it looks somehwat close to P/S, a little darker, but close. Then I upload the .jpg to walmarts photo site. When I view the same pic there, its not even close.

Attached is a screen capture of the three images. If it was just the fact that my monitor was out of calibration, (I really dont think its my monitor) then wouldnt all the three pictures show the same amount of error?

When I upload the pics to w/m site, I am uploading the full resolution image and no correction. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?
 

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2013-02-07_2235.png2013-02-07_2235.pngI did another test. This time, I opened my RAW file using the Canon Digital Pro software that came with my camera. Did a save-as and exported this out to .jpg. Uploaded this to the walmart site. This looks much better. I think this would probably print just fine.

Not exactly sure why it is doing it like this. I always thought that it was "best" to shoot in RAW, then bring this into P/S and convert to jpg (or other format) after the edits. THis makes me wonder.
 
View attachment 27618I did another test. This time, I opened my RAW file using the Canon Digital Pro software that came with my camera. Did a save-as and exported this out to .jpg. Uploaded this to the walmart site. This looks much better. I think this would probably print just fine.

Not exactly sure why it is doing it like this. I always thought that it was "best" to shoot in RAW, then bring this into P/S and convert to jpg (or other format) after the edits. THis makes me wonder.
 
Please post one of the images in question here in this forum. Without it, we're only guessing.

Tom M

PS - I mean the actual image, not a screen shot.
 
If monitor calibration truly has been excluded as a cause, then, consider that the next most common cause of such problems is exporting the file in a color space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto instead of sRGB. There has been a lot written on this. Some short introductions to this problem have been posted here. Scroll down for my posts in these threads:

http://www.photoshopgurus.com/forum...43446-ps-good-color-jpg-darker-color-why.html

http://www.photoshopgurus.com/forum...cs6-showing-different-colors-compare-cs5.html

Although the following links are more related to differences in color and tonality when viewed in different browsers, many of the problems are identical when you send an image to a printer that doesn't recognize color profiles and you have been working in something other than sRGB. Take a look at:

http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

or do the following search {"color managed" browser safari "tom mann" site:photo.net}

If you post here one the same image file that gave your printer problems, we'll at least be able to tell about the color space you used, whether or not the image itself has some other problem, etc. Screen shots tell us nothing about such issues.

HTH,

Tom M
 
Tom,
I havent calibrated my monitor with a piece of hardware, but I am now just trying to figure out how to get the image thats on the w/m site (or any other internet site) to look the same as what I see from my image viewer or P/S. The monitor calibration issue should only come into play when the image is printed.

From the testing I did later last night, it does seem related to the the sRGB or Adobe RGB profiles. I will look at the links that you posted. I will also post my P/S image later this afternoon when I get to where the file is located.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

Kirk
 
Are you doing any correction in ACR ? or only PS. I shoot RAW and use bridge to import, then I open in ACR set white balance if needed, then look at correcting .
 
MikeMc said:
Are you doing any correction in ACR ? or only PS. I shoot RAW and use bridge to import, then I open in ACR set white balance if needed, then look at correcting .
Click to expand...

Mike,
For the test that I have been doing, to figure out this problem, I have not been doing any adjusting in ACR. I did notice in ACR, down at the bottom center of the ACR window, it tells you what color space its using. You can click on this and change it. Whatever I set this to, when I take the image into PS and edit, when I export to jpg, it uses the same color space. (See attached)


When I import the raw image into Lightroom and then take it to PS, when I export to JPG from there, it is always "ProPhoto RGB" color space. I dont know how to change this and I think that is part of my problem. The jpgs that come from LR use a different color space than the ones that I bring to PS from ACR.

I could be totatlly wrong, but this is what it seems to me the problem is. Not sure how to get around it right now.
 

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Tom,
In the thread you linked to above "Photoshop CS6 showing diff colors compared to CS5", in one of your responses, you said:

"Many folks have their PS installations set up to open images in ACR for manipulation before they are handed over to PS. If, by some chance you do this and are using different default presets in the two versions of ACR, this could also (very easily) cause the problems that you see."

That is exactly what I am doing and see a problem. How do I set it up so that LightRoom and PS use the same color profile?
 
If monitor calibration truly has been excluded as a cause, then, consider that the next most common cause of such problems is exporting the file in a color space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto instead of sRGB. There has been a lot written on this. Some short introductions to this problem have been posted here. Scroll down for my posts in these threads


Check out Toms advice....he is VERY good!
 
MikeMc said:
If monitor calibration truly has been excluded as a cause, then, consider that the next most common cause of such problems is exporting the file in a color space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto instead of sRGB. There has been a lot written on this. Some short introductions to this problem have been posted here. Scroll down for my posts in these threads


Check out Toms advice....he is VERY good!
Click to expand...

Mike,
When I export my edits for P/S to jpg, it saves them in "ProPhoto RGB". This was a RAW image that I adjusted in LR before I brought it into PS.

How do I get PS so that it will export the sRGB instead of the ProPhoto RGB when I send to jpg?

From what I have been testing, this seems to be most of the problem.

Kirk
 
Tom,
Here is one of the photos from my post above. This image has a "2" in the top right corner. This image was imported into LR, but made not edits, then takeen to PS where I did edits. When I exported this to jpg, I unchecked the "ProPhoto RGB". This picture looks very close to PS when I view it with MS Office Viewer (or even Internet Explorer 9). But when I upload this to w/m site for print, the colors are way off. THis is what I am trying to show in my third post in this thread.

If you want the PS file let me know.

Thanks,
Kirk
 

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Hi Karthur -

Unfortunately, I'm working like crazy to get out some publicity posters for a conference next week, so I didn't look over your material very closely.

From what I can tell, there is probably a *very* simple, quick and dirty change you can make that will give you better agreement between what you see in PS and the prints you get back:

(a) For the moment, don't worry about all the intermediate steps like whether or not the image started life as a raw file or a jpg, whether or not you ran it through ACR or you took it directly into PS. In fact, don't even worry about your working color space (for the moment). What's important is that you make whatever adjustments you need to do to get the image looking the way you want in PS. Save this version as a PSD file.

(b) Now, the all-important 2nd step: With the image looking good in PS, go to the edit menu and click on the Edit / "Convert to profile..." menu item. Make sure you DO NOT click on "Assign profile ...". A dialog box will open and list the color space you have been working in, and will also give you a selection of destination color spaces. If it shows that your working space was sRGB, all is good. You are done. Simply save the file as a JPG. However, if the dialog box shows that your working space was something other than sRGB, select sRGB as the destination space, make sure the black point compensation is "on" and "perceptual" is selected, then hit "Enter".

You probably won't see much of a change, but immediately give the PSD file a new name like previousName-sRGB.psd. Then, first save it as a PSD file, and then save it again as a JPG file.

If you had been working in the ProPhoto color space, I can essentially guarantee you better colors and tones if you now send your files off to a printer like Walmart that caters primarily to amateur snapshooters (in other words, they blithely disregard color space information and assume everything sent to them is in sRGB).

In fact, do a little experiment: send them two versions of the same file, one in ProPhoto, like you had been doing, and one in sRGB. I'm sure the sRGB print will look a lot closer to what you see in your monitor (if it's anywhere near close to being reasonably calibrated).

HTH,

Tom M

PS - In some later discussion we can get into questions like, "What's the best color space to work in?", "Should you process in ACR or go directly into PS", etc., etc.
 
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PS - In some later discussion we can get into questions like, "What's the best color space to work in?", "Should you process in ACR or go directly into PS", etc., etc.


Tom..I would love to hear / read your answers to both topics you mention.

Please if you could find time ,post the whole enchilada up, with your insights.


Mike
 
Tom,
Thanks for that post. I could not figure out how to get my PS image output to sRGB. Your Step 2 told me what I needed.

Last night I opened my finished PS image in Lightroom and exported it to jpg. There I could choose the sRGB profile. I had a few of them printed this morning with that profile and they are 110% better. They are still slightly darker than what I am seeing, but that could be from my monitor being slightly off.

I have a Color Munki on the way. It will be here next week, so hopefully once my monitor is "properly" calibrated, this issue will be put to bed.

I am with MikeMc too about hearing what you have to say about the best color space to work in.

Thanks again.

Kirk
 
Thanks guys. You're making me blush. I've got a big gig tomorrow night (incl. handling the multi-media + photography of a guest panel incl. a Nobel prize winning physicist) and a bunch of posters due next week, so I'll try to write something up on those topics when things settle down here. Right now, I'm blowing in a clean install of the OS, PowerPoint, etc. on the podium computer.

T
 
For a follow up on this issue. I used my new color munki and let it calibrate my monitor. I then compared the last picture (printed using sRGB) with the color of my monitor. Supprisingly, the colors are not as close as I expect them to be. I have tried adjusting brighness contrast and Gamma. But that does not help.
The colors on my models face look pinkish on my monitor, but they are more orangish when it prints. The dark colors are much more darker on the print as compared to my monitor.
 
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