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Hello Photorich,

 Part of your problem may be the profiles of your papers that you use. If your monitor is calibrated and you have the paper profiles downloaded and installed, you should be close! I don't know what  monitor you have, but that makes a difference too.

If you don't have a calibrated monitor, then go buy a $100 tool and then tweak the final print. A laptop is different from a monitor and the calibration kit you buy will know this and adjust it for you. I don't use my laptop for any important image adjustment and only use it for temporary storage of files. As a last resort, you can always see what's wrong on your print and fix it on the screen, not really looking at what it looks like on your screen, but how it prints!

 Rich Franco

www.richfrancophotography.com 
Posted 4 months ago
Rich Franco was invited by Yedda to answer this question.

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Photorich (thinks this answer is Helpful)

Thanks Rich F, You're right when you touched on the ICC profiles of the papers compared to the LCD, (I have a laptop), and the profile that controls that. In fact, I continued reading and studying and found & fixed my problem. As usual, the trouble was me. When I first got this laptop, (January 2009), I was not familiar with Vista. So foolishly, I started poking around different main settings and came upon screen calibration settings. Well long story short, I really messed that up by changing the default settings and inputting new settings that were wrong and then assigning those as the default settings! What a mess. In Vista, there are a lot of things that they have added and often it includes the ability to reassign the defaults. I think that that kind of control is not very useful and as I found out, it can be downright awful if you don't know what you're doing. Anyway, I remembered all this as I read and finally fixed my problem which was the screen's assigned default 'Input Profile', (it should have been set to Adobe RGB 1998), and even worse, the assigned 'Intent' which for my uses should have been 'Perceptual'. I didn’t mention that I always use the paper manufacturers ICC profiles that they recommend for their paper in my initial question, (as well as a number of other technical details), because the whole question was already too long. I knew that if there was someone out there that could offer some helpful directives, that they would know to ask or mention points about the ICC paper and screen profiles as you have. I do plan to buy and hook up an external high quality monitor in the near future. Thanks for the help and suggestions. My problem is fixed, but I do have a question for you. Where can you find a $100.00 Screen-to-Printer calibration device!? And who makes it? The best price I found so far was $279.00, (free shipping), for the $299.99 Spyder 3Print. The Spyder 3Elite is a monitor only calibration device and I think the lowest I saw that for so far was $199.00. But I didn’t see any screen-to-printer devices for only $100.00! Who has those?
Posted 4 months ago
 
Rich Franco

Hello PhotoRich,

 Glad I could help. As far as the calibration tool that does the screen and a test print, you're right, there aren't any that I know of. I just use the $99 Spyder and then tweak the print. If it's +5 cyan all the time I just always add +5 red and see if I like the output. When printing my landscapes and nature scenes, color reall isn't that critical, since I generally don't use filters on the camera any more and just adjust the color in Camera Raw or later in layers.

If you are printing images and the color needs to be dead on, then you need to invest in a $2-4,000 monitor and a wide format epson printer, with the new inks, and maybe even a RIP type software program like Image Print.

Good Luck,

 Rich Franco

www.richfrancophotography.com
Posted 4 months ago
 
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