Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I have an Epson R800 and if I set up according to Quimage suggestions my prints come out to dark.

I cannot adjust brightness in the driver as we have turned this off.

Anyone have any suggestions.

Epson Premium Glossy all Epson Inks.

Yes,
The problem is that your monitor is too bright and you are adjusting a bit darker to compensate,  Here's what I always do to fix it.

Most folks will balk that they profiled their monitor, but brihtness and contrast usually don't figure in. Profile the colors.
Now select the proper profie for the Epson Ultra prem. Glossy, and of course, as you said no color controls in the driver.
Now make a print. Let it dry/cure over night.
Now adjust the monitor brightness and contrast controls (usually on the monitor itself) and match the monitor image of that print, to the print in your hand.

Im using Raw files that qimage default processes.
My monitor has been done with spider. but to make brighter I would have to adjust brightness in the picture.

It is perfect on the screen.

Changing the monitor brightness would not change the brightness in qimage default.

Would It?

It would now look darker on the screen.

You almost have the idea...
The monitor is too bright. Adjust the brightness and contrast on the monitor until it is close to the print brightness and contrast.
Now it should look darker on the screen.
IN RAW refine, use FILL, or ODR, and corret the picture to look right. You will likely have to lighten the image.
You brighten the image correction, and the print will be lighter.
Profile usually corrects colors.  Rarely adjusts brightness and contrast. 
Still, make a print using the proper profile and driver settings, let it dry, and set the screen to closely match the print, and you will be fine.
Alternate.    Find a jpg test image. Again with proper profile for the paper, make a print. Then match the screen to the print brightness and contrast.

You are not alone.... folks have been dealing with this for many years...

Fred

I understand that you are lowering the brightness to make it match the print then to increase in the editing stage to make it look right.

If you do this then my monitor screen will be too dark for everything else.??

Not really. It will prevent an over bright condition which you  got used to.
Terry, who should be back from vacation/holiday this weekend actually has a profiler that sets the brightness or shows the correct brightness level to set.
Wait a bit and maybe he can do better then I am doing.

Fred

I've delayed replying so far because I wanted to go through Jose's videos and see which one of his "prints are too dark" videos was the most direct and to the point.  He's had to reply to that issue so many times that he's gone at it from just about every angle as far as explaining things and why there are so many complaints about prints being too dark compared to the monitor.  Anyway, I ended up deciding this one was probably the most direct and to the point.  Hopefully this will help:

https://youtu.be/OZOvESXxXSM

Regards,
Mike

Hello Mike

After carrying out various tests including looking at the video.

I can not make the screen brightness as low as the print I am getting.

The print quality is fine but just too dark.


The print on the screen looks great if not a shade bright but the print is dark.

The monitor brightness adjustment before I started was on 50 out of a max of 99.

I can reduce to 0 and I can still not get it to match the print the screen is not really very good on 0

I have recalibrated after each change of brightness.

Let's take a breath.
Assuming that you have the correct profile selected and set in the Profile slot in Qimage, and the driver is set to the right paper and Color Management is off, the print that comes out of the printer is correct.

The next thing I would do is procure a sample test image like digital dog or fuji (free from internet), and doing nothing to the image, make a print.
See snap
Still too dark? Take the print outside and look after it dried an hour. Or use a good OTT lite or similar.
Just see what the printer is making. Not camparing to the monitor.
Fred

Hi rockingroy,
Fred has asked me to come in on this as I too have been calibrating monitors for some time and getting the monitor to match the print without too much difficulty. NB. It's that way round, not adjusting the image when colour managed printing is used! I have an Eizo monitor and their guidance strongly emphasises this.
All that has been said by Fred, Mike and the video are correct.
I had an R800 until upgrading to an R2000 about 3 years ago
A bit of background, it's an engineering one so I like working to numbers. I have an Eye One 2 Display calibration device which does have its own software. In the advanced mode, it's possible to set the target luminance, recommended to be 120cd/M^2. With my previous Eizo 22" monitor I found a target value of 110cd/M^2 gave the best print to monitor match for shadow detail and general brightness. Using the numerical values means that you have a definite value to work with which is more reliable than the percentage setting on the monitor.
The 22" monitor eventually started to be inconsistent with respect to calibration and matching to prints.
I now have a new Eizo 24" monitor with hardware calibration. The latter means the graphics driver is not used to store the calibration settings in a look-up-table (LUT) but within the monitor's electronic hardware.
The monitor has its own calibration software where the default luminance setting is 100cd/M^2. However I have found a setting of 80cd/M^2 gives the best match to a print.
So, a couple of things to note from this:
If your calibration software allows you to set a target luminance value, use it.
Monitors "wear" out, especially those without LED illumination, I suspect this may be your problem since you said changing the brightness setting made little difference.
Take Fred's advice to print a couple of different professional test images, there's plenty to chose from.
Terry

Thanks to everyone for replying to this.

I have downloaded from digital dog a test print JPG.

I have printed through qimage with no adjustments.

It is too dark.

In the past to get round this I have turned on let printer control colour and then I can change the gamma.

Which would give me a reasonable result but not the same quality.

Roy

Hi Roy,
Something is missing, a setting in the driver, no profile set in QU or wrong profile, wrong paper selection in driver, something!
What is the driver version? My old one says 6.53

From my angle of approach, a person can unplug or shut off his monitor and it will have zero effect on the print.
Therefore, putting the monitor aside, let's get a decent print with regard to light and dark
Just for my own clarity, please rephrase this for me:
Are you saying that you did not change any adjustments, or are you saying that you had NO COLOR ADJUSTMENTS  OFF, checked?
Please check the attached screen snap and see if we are the same.

Fred

I would totally agree with that. If a standard test image is too dark then there's something wrong with driver and or QU settings. So, check the items Fred has suggested and show us some screen shots of the driver and QU settings on the Properties tab.
Terry

Yeah, in addition, it might also be time to just take a cell phone shot of the print and post a small version here.  All this time we're assuming the print is just a little too dark but for all we know, it may be WAY too dark.  Sometimes even a cheesy cell phone shot will show us how dark it is... or maybe we even see other problems like increased saturation or some other clue to the problem.

Mike

I had a Eizo S2110 with a Epson R1900 and prints were almost always too dark  it made no difference calibrating the monitor and setting brightness mostly down to 80cd/M^2  or even lower.  I came to the conclusion something on my system was resetting the brightness   For printing I got over the problem by adjusting the brightness in QI


I now have a new Eizo 24" monitor with hardware calibration same as Terry printing through a Canon Pro S100  with the brightness set to 100 and no dark print problem. I also have a setting (profile) at 80

I still have the original Eizo now coupled to a Linux Comp. So as a test I have viewed an image with this setup.

Screen is way too bright and under linux had to set brightness down to 0% to get similar brightness.

Coupled the original Eizo to Windows comp. and  although only the windows desk top background image will show find I have to set brightness to 75cd or lower to get a match but difficult to judge because colours appear to be way too warm.

Work still to do is to get the original screen working with windows and see where that takes us.

So far I think it proves my dark prints were a question of screen settings.

Jeff

Now that you mention the R1900, I do remember that I wasn't very happy with Epson's profiles for that printer.  I didn't think much of it because I always make my own profiles anyway.  My complaint was that the R1900 Epson profiles tended to block the shadows a bit.  I guess that could be interpretted as too dark depending on the subject matter.  Once I created my own profiles, the blocked shadows were gone so maybe Epson just wasn't using the best equipment when they created profiles for those older printers.

Mike

Thanks for the replies I am sorry for the delay but have not been around until now.

I am unsure of how to get screen shots to you.

But the printer settings are essentialy the same as yours in the picture. bar Photo RPM - I have best photo

And the high speed is turned off.

I have now done a further print using file manager to print the test picture ( from digital Dog.) through the default windows printer and it is nearly correct just slightly dark.

This would imply that some setting in qimage is affecting the brightness.

I recently tried another paper icm that I downloaded from Epson america which has a peculiar name E_FICM9YE.ICM

But it is dated 2004/11/29 so is fairly old. for premium glossy epson paper.

Roy

I'm not aware of any way to print using ICC profiles via file manager so you probably ended up doing something closer to "let printer manage colors".  You can "associate" an ICC profile with the device (your R800) but that's not the same as actually using that profile outside the driver via full color management like Qimage, Affinity, Photoshop, Lightroom, and other ICC aware applications do.

Also keep in mind that any of those Epson profiles that you find that have cryptic names (they usually start with "E" followed by 6-8 random looking letters/numbers)... are not designed to be used outside the driver.  They are specialized profiles that are meant only for use by the driver itself so you can't use those in a color managed application like Qimage, PhotoShop, LR, etc.

The newer Epson profiles (ones that come with more recent models) that are meant for use in color managed applications are more readable file names that start with something like "Epson_SP7900..." or "Epson Stylus Pro..." followed by the name of the paper.

Mike

This is what the correct profile looks like.

Fred