Digital printing help

[ash13brook]

Can someone point me to a website that is a tutorial for digital printing?

I can get a scan ready, but when I print it, the color never matches or B & W scans don't llok black and white - more bluish.I hear alot about downloading profiles and calibrating monitors, but my head starts spinning as soon as I start thinking about it. Mostly, I'm looking for something that puts the whole thing into a orderly workflow. Sort of like ...first do this , then this, then this, now print. I know that's sort of simplistic, but...

Also, how do you tell how high of a resolution to use relative to the size of print you are planning.

I use PS Elements 5.0 and an Epson R380 printer.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Larky]

Hello.

Sorry, can't find exactly what you are looking for but after doing calibration for print work as a job and using every trick and piece of technology available at the time I can tell you it's sadly all down to trial and error. To be honest, an inkjet will always give slightly different results due to the way they work, so calibrating to perfection is not going to happen, but you can get close.

First off, kill as much ambient light around your monitor as possible, and remove all strong colours from the walls around it. If you can, get some 50% grey card and make a surround, it sounds mad, but your eyes are your biggest enemy here. If you want to do this for real, you'd need a room where everything was 50% grey!

Next, reset your monitor to factory defaults. Then, and this is where I disagree with most of the tutorials, do not set the contrast to maximum and adjust the brightness to suit - your monitor will not like this and it doesn't work anyway.

Your printer probably prints RGB, or at the very least converts to RGB space, so make sure you always work in RGB. Are you on Apple, if so choose Apple RGB as the profile for your monitor in the display settings window in the system settings window.

Not being an Elements user I don't know how it handles profiles etc, but most times you don't need to worry. Print out, onto the type of paper you use, a colour grid with red, green, blue blocks from 100% down to 10% in 10% increments. Add a black to white gradient too. Then, kill the lights in the room where you work and adjust the monitors settings to suit.

The thing here is that most people get confused as to what profiles actually do. Most of them will try to emulate what your monitor looks like at the point of print, but this is where the Epson software takes over and uses it's own anyway so what's the point. For simple home use, you are better off trying to get what you see on the screen to look like what the printer produces with all of the settings at factory default.

Remember to write down the settings that work for you. And also remember to let the test prints dry for at least 30 mins before using them to calibrate, they may feel dry but they aren't.

Also, when you collect your images from the camera, if it asks you to do anything to a profile, make sure you always do the same thing.

If I think of anything more when I wake up, I'll post. Good luck.

A.

 

[mfunnell]

This:

http://www.imagescience.com.au/Knowledge/DFP/DFP.html

sets out some of the basics.

I found these video downloads good, but they cost money:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/videos/camera-print.shtml

Sorry, but if you want to play with accurate colour you're going to have to come to terms with colour management - ICC profiles, colour spaces and all.

...Mike

 

[mfogiel]

For B&W read this:
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm