Datacolor User to User Support Group.

I have to concur with Bob that there is something somewhere not quite right.

Unfortunately I struggle with some of the concepts etc as I am not a photographer but 
do the computer setup for my wife who is.

I have done umpteen scans, used tons of paper and ink but cannot get printouts even 
close to the screen. I use a Spyder3Elite, a Canon i9000 or Epson R800. I know how to 
make sure that the printer drivers are turned off and how to print from Photoshop (CS3 
at the moment).

The seriously annoying thing is that I have had the printing working correctly at least 3 
times. My wife goes through bursts of printing but my interest isn't in studying this. Until 
she tells me that something is wrong, I do a test print exactly as I and her have done 
before, and it comes out wrong. I doublecheck everything 5 times but it just doesn't 
work. In my case it looks as if it is double profiling (generally prints are too dark or have 
a magenta or green shift) but believe me the printer driver is TURNED OFF 
(Photoshop manages colour) and only Photoshop should be managing colour.

It is almost as if something is changing every few months then somehow gets reset for 
a while then loses itself again.

And I have never got the soft proof to look anything like either the screen or printout. 
The few times we attempt adjustments to make the soft proof look even vaguely like 
the screen the prints come out even worse.

Happens exactly the same from both our systems running XP Pro SP3. My wife uses a 
Dell 2408WFP and I use a Samsung 245B (I know it isn't in the same class but the 
colours still look okay).

Both printers always test fine re ink ie all the jets are firing.

Somebody has commented in the past that the R800 tended to put down too much ink 
but if this was correct why has it worked okay sometimes.

Back to some more profiling tonight I guess....

> 
>  
> Terrie,
> 
> Thanks for all the information you furnished below....
> 
> 
> I spent the last 5 days really getting nowhere than where I was last
> week with color matching.
> 
> I will summarize.....
> 
> I normally use
> 
> 1. Windows Vista Home Premium.
> 2. NEC P221 LCD monitor calibrated using NEC's SpectraView II with a
> NEC supplied I1 Display 2 
> calibrator that is special calibrated for their wide gamut monitors.
> This calibration is performed in the 
> monitor's hardware and stored in the LUTs.
> 3. Canon 6 ink I950 printer. Using Canon Photo Paper Pro paper for
> this test.
> 
> Test....
> 
> 1. I set up a simple test target of objects with various colors,
> bright whites, deep blacks, shades, etc. in a 
> totally dark room illuminated by tungsten lights. Using my Nikon
> D700 I manually measured/adjusted 
> white balance and shot in the SRGB space. The Nikon RAW file
> displayed on my NEC monitor in Nikon 
> Capture NX2 looks identical to what I see in real life.I saved the
> file in NX2 as a TFF and viewed it 
> Photoshop CS4 and it matches identically to what I see in NX2. So we
> can say that the monitor is well 
> calibrated and both applications display the proper image.
> 
> 2. I ran the Spyder3Print calibration again using the Canon I950 I
> turned off all color management in the 
> Canon I950 driver, color adjustment is set to manual, not much else
> to change there. Printed the Spyder3 
> test patterns, colors plus grays, scanned them in. Printed the
> Spyder3 test photo and it had slightly more 
> saturated colors, slight red hue than what I see on the monitor, the
> B/W sections were leaning more to a very 
> dark gray tint than black. I looked at the soft-proof . The Spyder3
> soft-proof colors matched the monitor 
> test photo but were slightly washed out, so I lowered the black
> level in the soft-proof down to 1 as suggested 
> by David T. and the soft-proof matched the non-soft-proof test image
> identically for color and contrast.Now 
> this is nice that I have the test image and soft-proof image
> matching, but neither match the printed photo. If 
> I edit the profile to reduce the saturation I can get the printed
> photo to match closer to the original test 
> photo, but then the soft-proof image doesn't match since any slider
> edits to the profile is also going to change 
> the soft-proof image in a negative way. I did a lot of profile
> editing and the printout still does not match the 
> original image as well as printing using the Canon Standard
> Driver.
> 
> 3. Now I went one extreme step further and found a new in factory
> sealed box Canon Pro9000 MKII for 
> $250 and bought that to compare in this test. That is an 8 ink
> printer (additional red and green inks with the 
> 6 of the I950).
> Ran the same as 2 above, got the same results; printout is slightly
> color saturated, towards red tint, soft-
> proof slightly washed out and fixed it with the soft-proof black
> level.Canon Standard Driver matches the 
> original image very well. I would like to say that this printer is
> one huge printer and I really can't see any 
> printout detail differences against the I950.
> 
> 4. Now believing that something is not set correctly in Windows
> Vista or my system that I just couldn't 
> finger. I pulled out my old Windows XP system, ran the monitor
> calibration, attached both printers, printed 
> out the test sheets, scanned, adjusted the soft-proof, and the
> printouts still show slight over saturation, red 
> tint, etc. Again the Canon Standard Drivers match the monitor image
> almost exactly.
> 
> 5. Put a very good SONY CRT monitor on the system, calibrated it and
> the same results as 4 above.
> 
> 
> I realize that there are many sliders to edit the profile but after
> a few boxes of paper and many ink cartridges 
> it is difficult to get close to matching the printout to the
> display. I do realize gamut limitations but the Canon 
> Standard Driver does a great job.
> 
> I was expecting that the Spyder3Pint was going to make it painless
> for me to generate profiles with different 
> papers, I assumed you just printed the charts, scanned, and bingo
> the as perfect as possible ICC profile would 
> be generated that would beat the Canon Standard Driver every time.
> 
> I really don't know where to go from here. I must be missing
> something somewhere.
> 
> I can use all the help and suggestions that anyone can give me!
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> 
> Bob P.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> At 04:25 PM 8/29/2009, you wrote:
>     
>     
>     >>Bob Petruska <petruska@...>: I will be running the tests over
> the weekend and report 
>     back to the forum my findings.
>     
>     I will be most interested in your report...
>     
>     >>I'm sitting here thinking that even though I have a calibrated
> NEC
>     monitor how do I know that the printer and the monitor think
> alike
>     with the same file data? What I'm getting at is that if I have
> two
>     calibrated mid range quality monitors like a NEC and Samsung
> sitting
>     next to each other I would bet that the same image file would
> look
>     slightly different between them.
>     
>     If you are looking at the same image on different monitors using
> a color management aware 
>     software (let's say Photoshop with the same Working Space on all
> the monitors), then the 
>     images should display identically because that's the whole point
> of HARDWARE monitor 
>     calibration.
>     
>     Many years ago, Bruce Fraser (sadly missed) discussed color
> management, monitor 
>     calibration and printer profiles (on Epson printers but it
> should apply to Canon printers also) 
>     in various posts on the old Compuserve Publishing Production
> forum and I saved those 
>     posts.
>     
>     I hope you will find Bruce's explanations useful:
>     
>     "At the heart of all color management there's a thing called
> the
>     profile connection space, or PCS. In current implementations
> it's
>     always either CIE Lab or CIE XYZ, and the math for getting from
> one
>     to the other is fairly trivial.
>     
>     The unique property of these spaces, as opposed to RGB or CMYK,
> is
>     that they unambiguously represent a perceived color.
>     
>     Profiles are essentially lookup tables that say what device
> values
>     (RGB or CMYK) will produce specific perceived colors.
>     
>     Color-managed applications like Photoshop use working spaces so
> that
>     they can make the image look right on different monitors.
>     
>     The Epson profile doesn't try to match your monitor, it tries
> to
>     match the working space, via Lab. Photoshop also does an
> on-the-fly
>     transform from the working space to your monitor's space, so
> that the
>     image appears correct on your monitor, whatever it is. It'll do
> a
>     different transform for someone else's monitor, but as long as
> the
>     monitor profile is accurate, the image will appear identical.
>     
>     You profile your printer so that, when it gets fed known color
>     values, it produces those colors. You profile your monitor so
> that
>     when it gets fed known color values, it produces those colors.
>     
>     Working spaces contain known color values, because they're
> referenced
>     to Lab. So when you feed a file in a working space to
>     correctly-profiled devices, the color comes out right. The
> printer
>     and the monitor are entirely separate from each other. They only
> talk
>     to each other through the color management system.
>     
>     So it really doesn't matter what standard you choose to
> calibrate
>     your monitor to. All that matters is that you have an accurate
>     description of that standard (a good monitor profile), and the
> color
>     management system will ensure that the signals that get sent to
> your
>     monitor will make it display the image correctly. It'll do the
> same
>     thing on my monitor, even if it's calibrated to completely
> different
>     settings from yours."
>     
>     AND:
>     
>     "What color management can do, and do well, is to translate the
> monitor image into the 
>     color gamut and dynamic range of your printer, as faithfully as
> possible, and at the same 
>     time show you how the print will appear, allowing you to make
> any necessary optimizations 
>     before you print.
>     
>     In applications like Photoshop, images live in an abstract RGB
> working space that isn't tied 
>     to the quirks of a specific device, such as Adobe RGB (1998).
>     
>     To display the file accurately on your monitor, Photoshop looks
> at your monitor profile, and 
>     adjusts the values being sent to the video card so that the
> color displays correctly on your 
>     monitor. It will do the same when the same image is displayed on
> my monitor, or on Tom's 
>     or Dick's or Harry's. Other than that, the monitor is out of the
> loop.
>     
>     When you print using color management, the CMS looks at the
> source color space (e.g. 
>     Adobe RGB) and at the output space (e.g. your printer profile).
> It derives the Lab values that 
>     are represented by Adobe RGB values and by printer RGB values,
> then builds a big lookup 
>     table to go from the one to the other. Your monitor is out of
> this loop.
>     
>     To see how the print will appear before you make it, you need to
> use the CMS to simulate 
>     the output, which it does by converting the data on the fly from
> Adobe RGB to printer RGB, 
>     then to your monitor RGB. That's what Photoshop's Proof Setup
> features are for. In this 
>     case, the monitor is in the loop, but your printer profile
> doesn't need any knowledge of it.
>     
>     Profiles are like dual-language dictionaries. They're
> essentially lookup tables that have 
>     device signal values (RGB or CMYK) on one side, and
> device-independent CIE values (LAB 
>     or XYZ) on the other. No profile needs any knowledge of any
> other device's behavior: all the 
>     profiles use CIE LAB or CIE XYZ as the interchange medium
> (they're called the Profile 
>     Connection Space, because that's their role)."
>     
>     AND:
>     
>     "If you calibrate the monitor, save the profile, load the
> profile, and
>     let Photoshop update the profile, you'll get an accurate display
> of
>     your image at that calibration. If you fail to take any of
> these
>     steps, Photoshop won't be displaying the image properly. When it
> does
>     display the image properly, it doesn't matter how your monitor
> is
>     calibrated. Right now I'm looking at the same image on a 5000K
> gamma
>     1.8 monitor, a 6500K gamma 1.8 monitor, and a 6500K gamma 2.2
>     monitor. The image looks identical on all three.
>     
>     Once more, the file-to-print transform is entirely separate from
> the
>     file-to-monitor transform. You can whack your monitor out into
> all
>     weird states under the sun, and it will still have zero
> influence on
>     the print. Forget about the idea of calibrating the monitor to
> the
>     print. That isn't how it works. You calibrate the monitor to
> some
>     known CIE values, and you profile the printer to some known
> CIE
>     values.
>     
>     Lets say you have two pieces of wood, each of which is some
> length.
>     You could say, 'piece o' wood #2 is 1.8 times the length of
> piece 'o
>     wood one.' That's like trying to calibrate your monitor to
> your
>     printer, and it isn't all that useful.
>     
>     But if you measure them, you can say 'piece o' wood 1 is 10
> inches
>     long. Piece o' wood 2 is 18 inches long.'
>     
>     That's how color management works, only the inches are CIE units
> instead."
>     
>     Terrie
>     http://tlbtlb.com/
>     tlbtlb@... 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  



Chris Calvert
Prebbleton Computer Services
Christchurch, New Zealand
Ph - 03 349 8182 or +64 3 349 8182
Cell - 021 83 22 55 or +64 21 83 22 55