Calibrating Monitor

[Tinkerbell]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Class latest version

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi
I have a NEC PA 243W monitor, a Canon Pixma Pro 100 printer and using Windows 10 and Lightroom Classic latest version. Currently the monitor is calibrated using SprectraView ii to D65, Gamma 2.2, Intensity 100 cd/m and contrast ratio of 250:1. When I printed out a picture, it looked a little duller and the color of the grass was much yellower then what was showing on the screen though the colors looked great on the screen. I used an ICC profile for my paper and turned off color management to none. I have read that calibrating to D50 is a better match for printing. Also, I believe the screen is still a little brighter then the picture that was printed out. At this point I am not sure what settings I should be changing in order to get my prints to match what I am seeing on the screen. Should I change from D65 to D50 and bring down to intensity to 90?

If I am correct in this statement, I believe that you can no longer change the color space in Lightroom to sRGB or Adobe RGB for it only uses ProPhoto RGB. Then if that is the case, how are you suppose to use Adobe RGB for editing if you cannot change the color space in LR?

When you are using an ICC profile for your paper for print, what color management are you turning off - the printer or LR?

Thanking you so much in advance for any information and clarity that you might be able to provide.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

If your monitor is set at D65, then it's normal that your print on printer (usually set at D50) appear a bit yellowish.
Yes, if you want an exact match between your screen and your print, you must set the screen at D50. However, this value is only useful for printing. For standard work it will appear too much yellow. You can either have 2 settings for your screen (if it has an esay way to switch) or use an intermediate like D58. Do some testing to see what fit best for you.

To print from LR, you need to set LR to manage the color (instead of the printer) and select the correct profile for for your paper. From the ICC profile for print, LR will know the gamut of your printer and do the conversion.
This implies that whan using an ICC profile for print, you turn the color management of the printer off.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

So if I can amplify the question because an aspect of it has always confused me....

You can use a printer/paper profile for soft proofing, i.e. for making your display look more like the final print.

And you can also declare a profile for printing.

Are they the SAME profile? Used in different ways?

So let's say I have a profile for printer X, presumably from the manufacturer of printer X (as opposed to me having a reflective colorimeter and building my own). How is that profile for printer X different from telling the printer to color manage instead of listing the profile in LR/PS?

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

Yes, it's the same profile used in LR for soft proofing and for printing. The purpose of soft proofing is to emulate (as much as possible) on your screen what you will see on your paper.
To work properly, there are prerequisits :
- Your screen must be calibrated. The screen profil will allow LR to convert the values send to the screen so the color displayed will be close to what is stored in the photo.
- Your must have a profile for the trio printer/ink/paper. It will allow LR to know what this trio can do and how it will restitute the colors.
With both these profiles, LR, knowing the values in the file to print, will be able to soft proof the print result, and convert correctly the values being send to the printer in order to get a result on the paper as close as possible of what you see on your screen.

What is important is to NOT have both the driver and LR to color manage, but only one of them (LR is better).

Note that if you don't have a calibrator for the printer (rather expensive) you can instead use a service on internet to do the calibration, which is usually much less expensive. They will send you a file to print with the printer/ink/paper and the instruction to properly set the printer. Once printed, you send the result to them, they will mesure the result with their calibrator and send you back the ICC profile file.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

A couple more questions to help narrow this down:

• Which paper are you printing on?
• When you look at the screen to compare it to the print, are you looking at the Develop module, or the Develop module with Soft Proofing enabled?

If I am correct in this statement, I believe that you can no longer change the color space in Lightroom to sRGB or Adobe RGB for it only uses ProPhoto RGB. Then if that is the case, how are you suppose to use Adobe RGB for editing if you cannot change the color space in LR?

No version of Lightroom Classic has allowed changing the color space used for editing. But that's OK, because it doesn’t matter. Although Lightroom Classic uses a form of ProPhoto RGB for its internal color space, you’re covered whether you view on screen, print, or export:

• Colors will look as consistent as possible on any display you use, as long as that display has been calibrated and profiled (as you have done), because your computer’s operating system will use the display profile generated by your calibrator to translate ProPhoto RGB to the color range your display can reproduce.
• Colors will look consistent as possible on any paper and ink you use, for similar reasons: Lightroom Classic will translate ProPhoto RGB to the color range of the printer+paper+ink profile you chose. (But this won't guarantee a perfect match; see below…)
• If you were exporting instead of printing, you would get to choose the color space (Adobe RGB etc) of the exported file.

Using your NEC PA 243W as a specific example (I have an NEC too):
Lightroom Classic will calculate colors using its version of ProPhoto RGB, then send that to your operating system, which will look up what display profile was generated by your calibrator. If you calibrated your NEC PA 243W to Adobe RGB, then the colors are translated to Adobe RGB for you to view — no problem, you are editing with an Adobe RGB preview, the best your display can provide.

Very important point:
You might do the best job of calibrating and have the best printer, but how close the print looks to the screen depends on the quality of the ink and paper, and that varies widely. An expensive fine art glossy paper may come closest to matching the screen, an inexpensive matte paper often looks kind of dull and disappointing compared to the screen. With all other paper+ink combinations looking somewhere in between. This is just because most paper+ink combinations reproduce a noticeably smaller range of colors and contrast than what a wide gamut display can reproduce.

This is why I asked if you were comparing the print to the Develop module, or the Develop module with soft-proofing enabled. Soft proofing, set correctly, is the preview that should be most consistent with the print. Because with Soft Proofing off, you are not seeing a preview of print colors; you are seeing all the colors your display can reproduce. With Soft Proofing on, you can get a sense of how much less color and contrast some papers can reproduce, and then you can create a Proof Copy to try and do the best adjustments you can within the constraints of the paper+ink in use. I posted an animation showing this, in another part of the forum:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/comm...ng-simulate-paper-and-ink.38868/#post-1256239
This is also why I keep saying colors "will look as consistent as possible" above, and not "will look the same on all screens" or "will look the same as the print." Because those last two are often not possible. What is possible is showing colors consistently within the limits of the specific screen or the paper+ink being used.

 

[Tinkerbell]

Thank you so much for your input. When I recalibrate my monitor to D50 should I also reset the luminance to 90 instead of the 100 that I currently have it set to since the monitor looks brighter than what is printed out. Is there some kind of balance that I should be using for the contrast setting for this? I know if the monitor is too bright then your prints will come out darker when printing. When monitor is set to D50 will this take care of the yellow cast that is in the grass when the monitor is showing a different green?

If I am correct in this statement, I believe that you can no longer change the color space in Lightroom to sRGB or Adobe RGB for it only uses ProPhoto RGB. Then if that is the case, how are you suppose to use Adobe RGB for editing if you cannot change the color space in LR? I am really confused on this issue on how to use Adobe RGB color space in Lightroom.

Your reply: "To print from LR, you need to set LR to manage the color (instead of the printer) and select the correct profile for your paper. From the ICC profile for print, LR will know the gamut of your printer and do the conversion. This implies that whan using an ICC profile for print, you turn the color management of the printer off. "

When turning off color management of the printer, is this where you go to page setup button, click on the main tab, click the color/intensity radio button to manual, hit the set button, click onto matching tab, and for color correction choose none. Then now Lightroom is managing color management and not the printer?

Thanking you again for any input you may provide.

 

[Tinkerbell]

Conrad
Thank you so much for the detailed explanation. Sorry for all of the questions in regards to this issue but this part of the process is rather new to me for I have not printed that much and now I have more of an interest in doing so.

o I am using Canon Semi-gloss paper for printing.
o I am using the Develop module to compare the printed image and what I have edited the picture to. I am not using soft proofing for I assumed that what you see on the screen is what should be the outcome of the print or somewhat pretty close. Should I be using Lightroom or Photoshop for soft proofing and I really don't know how to do this?

Should I also calibrate the monitor to D50 instead of D65 and change the intensity to 90 instead of 100 since the monitor looks brighter than what was printed out. I know if the monitor is too bright then your prints will come out darker when printing. If so, then what contrast should it be set to also.

Thanking you for your patience and appreciate any input.

 

[ChuckTin]

You need to remember that your eyes adapt to the monitor. I've called that the Shiney Object effect. And then _that_ will look "normal" or better than your print.
Have you ever noticed (this just happened to me while we were still able to go out!) a woman who has applied Musk perfume and later hasn't noticed the aah ... effect down wind? Same phenomenon. After a short while you get used to a personal environment and you don't notice.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

If I am correct in this statement, I believe that you can no longer change the color space in Lightroom to sRGB or Adobe RGB for it only uses ProPhoto RGB. Then if that is the case, how are you suppose to use Adobe RGB for editing if you cannot change the color space in LR? I am really confused on this issue on how to use Adobe RGB color space in Lightroom.

Truly you need to not think about what color space LR uses internally. It has nothing to do with ... well, anything. And you can't change it anyway. The main thing you need to know is that Adobe chose a wide color space so you are not losing colors to gamut. LR and/or the overall color management system is converting on the fly to whatever monitor/printer/etc you need.

To my recollection you could never change the color space inside of Lightroom.

Even if you COULD choose (say) your monitor to match the gamut that Lightroom uses, you have not really done that -- you are approximating it on the monitor, there's a profile in between tweaking each color as it displays. So this kind of on the fly translation is going to occur even where internal color space matches monitor.

Just don't think about LR's color space.

 

[happycranker]

I have an NEC monitor as well, so I have set different calibrations using SpectraView for different types of paper, so glossy, matt, metal etc. I typically have the brightness set way below 100 in my room setup, as the ambient light will be different for every case. Unfortunately trial and error are your best way forward, but this does mean using ink and paper to find the best results!

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Printing, and color management in general, is one of those deep subjects that can take years to understand, so there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking more questions. We all had to do it. We all still do it.

o I am using Canon Semi-gloss paper for printing.
o I am using the Develop module to compare the printed image and what I have edited the picture to.

OK. That helps us understand where you’re coming from.

I am not using soft proofing for I assumed that what you see on the screen is what should be the outcome of the print or somewhat pretty close. Should I be using Lightroom or Photoshop for soft proofing and I really don't know how to do this?

What you see on the screen would look pretty close to the print if...your screen and the paper/ink reproduced color in exactly the same way. But the problem is they are often very different. You might have heard that one reason is screens create color with transmitted light, while prints create color with reflected light.

Sometimes prints can look pretty close to the screen when an image happens to fit nicely into what both the display and the given paper+ink can reproduce. But what often contributes to the problem is that:

• The wide gamut display is showing the full Adobe RGB color gamut, and its default contrast range is probably something like 700:1 or more.
• Ink and paper reproduces a much smaller color gamut, and the contrast range of print is somewhere around 150-250:1 depending on how good the paper is. That is true whether it’s a a CMYK press, a darkroom print, or a Canon or Epson pro photo printer. (If you want to try limiting the contrast range of the display as part of calibration for print, see the section Defining Calibration Targets for Print Work in this article, How to Calibrate an NEC Monitor with SpectraView 2.)

So your display (and that NEC is a high quality pro display) shows the best possible image it can, and the Canon ink and paper can only reproduce as much of that as it can, but by nature it just can’t do as well. So by nature, the print doesn’t look exactly like the screen.

What soft-proofing does is include the printer profile in the preview, so that the full ProPhoto RGB preview from Lightroom is run through the printer profile, simulating the look of the print on the screen. My earlier post in this thread linked to another post in this forum; at the end of that post are two links to information about how soft-proofing works. Victoria does an overview of soft-proofing on page 322 of her LIghtroom Classic Missing FAQ. The Lightroom Classic help file covers soft-proofing, but just briefly.

There are a number of blog posts and YouTube videos about soft-proofing, but it’s important to stick to the ones by color experts; a lot of people don’t explain it correctly.

The most misleading thing that’s repeated is that all you have to do to get great prints is calibrate your display. Calibrating is the essential first step, ensuring that you’re editing on a display that’s as accurate as it can be. But it does not make the display look like the limited color and contrast range of different papers and inks. Soft-proofing is what fills that in, by letting you preview an image on your screen through different paper+ink profiles.

Should I also calibrate the monitor to D50 instead of D65 and change the intensity to 90 instead of 100 since the monitor looks brighter than what was printed out. I know if the monitor is too bright then your prints will come out darker when printing. If so, then what contrast should it be set to also.

Whether you should use D50 or D65 depends a lot on the lights you use to view your prints. In a professional print shop, they would be using expensive print viewing booths with lightbulbs tuned to very specific color temperature, and they would tell you whether they were using D50 or D65. But in your case, you should use the one that turns out to be a better match to the lighting under which the print will be finally displayed. In other words, the one where the print looks more like the screen.

Whether you should change the intensity is similar. If the print looks too dark under the lighting under which the final print will be displayed, then you could try lowering to 90.

Fun fact: An advanced color user can use the principles of soft proofing to set up a pro display like an NEC SpectraView with the printer profile, so that the display actually limits itself to the color gamut that profile and to a lower contrast range. That way you wouldn’t need to soft proof in any applications because the display is already doing it. In addition, a display like an NEC SpectraView can store multiple calibrations in the hardware. There can be one for Adobe RGB, another for sRGB, and another for proofing a specific printer profile, switchable at any time depending on what you’re working on. This may be too much for a beginner to try, but I’m just describing what’s possible.

 

[Tinkerbell]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU for all of your wonderful suggestions!!!! I really appreciate it and I am truly greatful. I did not realize that soft proofing and changing to D50 would make such a huge difference in the prints. The results now are like night and day. I am now such a Happy Camper. You guys are just the greatest!! Thank you again.

 

[LouieSherwin]

For more detail about why this works check out Andrew Rodney's video tutorial "Why are my Prints are too dark?".

-louie

 

[LouieSherwin]

He recently reorganized his main site and posted low resolution videos to YouTube. Here is the link to the high resolution video.

Video tutorial: Why are my prints too dark

 

[Tinkerbell]

Hi Everyone,

OK, I am stuck. As a refresher, I am using a Nec 243w (wide gamut) along with the Canon Pro 100 printer and want to print my own pictures. I have been playing with this for a month now and still my prints are not printing out as I see on my monitor. I have calibrated and recalibrated may times now for all three color spaces: Native, Adobe RGB and sRGB. The last calibration was set to D55, 2.20, Intensity 90 cd/m2, Contrast Ratio 200:1, for all three color spaces. I don't know if this difference is why the prints are different or not, but the Calibration Report indicated for Adobe RGB it calibrate to: White Point 5525, 2.20, Intensity 90.8 cd/m2 , Contrast Ratio 213.1, Primary Colors: Red 0.640, 0.330; Green: 0.210, 0.710; Blue: 0.150, 0.060.

I am finding that the Red color is darker and not as brilliant; Orange color is darker and not showing some of the red color that should be in it; Green color will show more yellow. A picture of a Deer shows more brown and none of the slight warm colors that shows on the screen. A picture of a Red Rose shows a more muddy and dull color and not the bright brilliant color that's on the screen. I have played with the HSL panel to try to bring out more of the colors along with soft proofing. Apparently, I do not know or understand how to resolve this issue.

I have been doing a lot of research and reading on what I should be doing and some say to use 1.8 instead of 2.20 for printing and anywhere from D50 to D58. With using a Canon printer and paper their web site indicates to use Adobe color space when printing but another website says to calibrate monitor in Native and zero black point. But according to Canon I should be using the AdobeRGB color space.

(Conrad indicated in his Fun fact: An advanced color user can use the principles of soft proofing to set up a pro display like an NEC SpectraView with the printer profile, so that the display actually limits itself to the color gamut that profile and to a lower contrast range. That way you wouldn’t need to soft proof in any applications because the display is already doing it. ) Any idea on how to do this?

I don't know if I should calibrate to slightly lower than 90 cd/m2 and contrast ratio to maybe 150 and D58. I realize that this is hard to visualize and would be much better if you could actually see it on the screen. Sure do wish that someone lived really close and could take a look and fix this - wishful thinking though. If it where only that easy.

Thank you again for any suggestions and input

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Can’t answer them all right now but for this specific question…

(Conrad indicated in his Fun fact: An advanced color user can use the principles of soft proofing to set up a pro display like an NEC SpectraView with the printer profile, so that the display actually limits itself to the color gamut that profile and to a lower contrast range. That way you wouldn’t need to soft proof in any applications because the display is already doing it. ) Any idea on how to do this?

Go to the NEC MultiProfiler downloads web page and download two things:

• MultiProfiler (latest version, if you don’t already have it)
• MultiProfiler User’s Guide (PDF)

In the MultiProfiler User’s Guide, the directions for creating a Picture Mode for Print Emulation start on page 37.
Honestly though, I’m still learning how to use that feature properly to get a better screen to print match, because it involves a lot of the other questions being asked about all the options that have to be set just right, relative to the viewing environment.

(Note for Mac & Linux users: MultiProfiler was recently upgraded for 64-bit compatibility. However, I think this is the reason that the MultiProfiler 1.4.30 Read Me file says “Due to changes in supporting macOS, the Print Emulation function is not available in MultiProfiler at this time.” If you have a Mac and really want to do this, and you’re not on macOS 10.15 yet, you can download an earlier 32-bit version of MultiProfiler such as 1.4.00, that still supports Print Emulation.)

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

I am finding that the Red color is darker and not as brilliant;

Is it when viewing in soft proofing with paper emulation?

Soft proofing can be done in the Develop module of LR, providing that 1/ the monitor is calibrated 2/ you have chosen the corect printer profile (for this paper and ink).

Also, keep in mind that a screen is emitting its own light whereas a print is reflecting the ambiant light. It's a huge difference which explains why print are always les "luminous" or "brillant" (don't know is these are the exact terms...) than an image on a screen. That was already true for print from slides, for the same reasons.
However, soft proofing (providing it is correctly set) should be able to display on the sceen an image very close to what the print will be.

 

[LouieSherwin]

OK, I am stuck. As a refresher, I am using a Nec 243w (wide gamut) along with the Canon Pro 100 printer and want to print my own pictures. I have been playing with this for a month now and still my prints are not printing out as I see on my monitor. I

I suggest that you checkout the tutorials by Andrew Rodney, particularly the one Why my prints are too dark. He goes into the details of what is needed to setup your monitor profile and viewing conditions to get the best possible match.

-louie