Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I hope that was a sufficiently provocative title to get the experts reading this post! I am tremendously impressed by QU, but I am consistently running into a problem with using it.

The problem is that my printed images are consistently slightly darker than my screen previews. To get them to print with the proper shadow density and general tone, I have to make the screen preview lighter than appropriate.

I have calibrated and re-calibrated my LCD, and upgraded from Datacolor Spyder 3 Pro to Spyder 3 Elite (a US$99 software upgrade) before recalibrating. I have profiled my printer/paper combination using the Datacolor Spyder 4 colorimeter. I have made sure that the monitor profile, the image colour space (Adobe RGB) and the printer/paper profile are all in their proper places. And I must say this is not only a QU problem. The images look fine in PhotoShop, but still come out too dark. Of course I wouldn't want to go back to printing in PS after having once tasted the convenience and flexibility of QU. But I am really frustrated by this persistent problem. I can fudge it by guessing how much lighter I have to make the images appear to get the right print density, but that's a slippery slope to start down, and it's a variable I want to eliminate.

Could it be the very variable levels of lighting in my home office? That's the only thing that occurs to me, but there doesn't seem to be any immediate correlation between lighting levels and print darkness. Any and all suggestions welcome! Or should I look into the Epson "advanced" ink density settings? Argh!!!

Hi Roger,
It has been my experience over and over, that the monitor is too bright!
I don't pretend to know the abilities of all the profiling packages that have come out lately which purport to read the brightness and allow that to be set, but I don't own such a sophisticated version as of yet.
I hope Terry gets on here. He has a profiling tool that does address the brightness.

In my case, I use a premade Epson Profile for Premium Luster and also Premium Glossy. I make test prints. If the prints appear too dark, compared to the monitor, I take the approach that Epson put some quality effort into making the profiles for my printer and their paper.
I assume the print is correct!
Once I get past that, I turn the brightness down, (usually to about 40-45%) and I also pay attention to the shadow detail and highlight detail and adjust the contrast to match too. (Usually close to 80%.

*NOW* I profile the monitor for color accuracy, and it works for me.

Terry will be along shortly, I'm sure. He has an iMatch thing that sets brightness.
So hang in there.

Fred

Hello Roger,
Fred is right, dark prints are usually caused by too bright monitors and users adjusting the image to the monitor, making it darker, so the print comes out dark.
I have an Eye One 2 Display calibration device and the software, in advanced mode, allows you to set the luminance (brightness). My software says the recommended value for LCD monitors is 120 CD/Msq. I find this works well. However, because I'm working with a "number" and relying on the calibration device, I believe that is more consist ant than doing things by eye. If you have to change the brightness to match prints, you change the target luminance value and calibrate accordingly and thus know where you are and can be consistent.
Does you software allow setting luminance, I'd be surprised if it does not?
One other point: -
That is possible. It's best to check under consistent conditions and bright daylight is good. However, it's not always possible to do that so I recommend getting an Ott Light. These are relatively inexpensive and give you a colour temperature & spectrum close to daylight and the "correct" brightness for viewing a print.
Terry

Thanks Fred and Terry. I'll reply to you both in this note, since you both mention monitor brightness. I am very much aware of the problem caused by a monitor that is too bright. I went to the Epson "Epsite" showroom, exhibition and support site in Tokyo and it was the first thing they told me, and said that unless you profile your monitor and adjust its brightness there is NO WAY to secure consistent prints. So I bit the bullet and bought a DataColor Spyder monitor profiler. This does include a brightness setting, which currently is set to 120CD/MSQ. This is on the calibration I did yesterday, when the light was still quite bright. Last month I did a profile in the evening and the level was set to 90. But at that time I did not have the printer/paper profile right and there were other things wrong with my prints than darkness. <wry grin>

Your comments encourage me to believe I was on the right track suspecting the variable level of room lighting. I live on the top floor of a large condominium in suburban Tokyo, and all morning the sun streams directly into the room. Even with the curtains closed, the ambient light level is reported by the Spyder as "Extremely bright--unsuitable for accurate colour management." But we use indirect lighting in the room, and the general level is very low once we have to switch the lights on. Spyder called this level "Low--ideal for accurate colour management."

Incidentally, the technical expert at DataColor with whom I corresponded was not impressed by the accuracy of Epson printer/paper profiles, saying they were a good first approximation (!) but could benefit from detailed tweaking using a colorimeter. These are much more expensive than the monitor calibration device but fortunately I was able to get mine secondhand from a professional photographer friend who has gone over to a pro lab for all his exhibition prints and no longer needs to profile his own. Support from Datacolor was excellent, just as if I had bought it new directly from them... they even gave me a registration code for software that had been upgraded since my unit was sold.

I'll also mention that the prints are not very much too dark, just slightly (but noticeably) darker than they should be. Looking at them in the bright sunlight streaming through my windows this morning they really don't look too bad although yesterday evening when I showed them to my wife they looked rather worse. I think what I should do is profile the monitor in the evening, when the lighting level is low, and set up the image files for printing during the daytime, when I will probably have to make them brighter. That way I may get prints that look a bit too bright or "thin" under bright daylight but look fine under artificial light. That's a more acceptable compromise than what I have now.

My budget for equipment is spent out right now but I'll certainly look into Ott lights. If "inexpensive" means the same thing to you and me, Terry, I'll get one from next month's budget. I'm a pensioner, so I have to watch the pennies.

Hi Roger,
I'm fortunate that my monitor has auto brightness so the brighter the ambient, the brighter the screen gets & visa-versa. However, I turn this off when calibrating which is done in a semi-darkened room. I also have a monitor hood which I made myself from 5mm black foam board and the odd bit of wood to stiffen it. It even has a hole in the top for the calibration puck to pass through.
The auto-brightness feature seems to work quite well.
Regarding Ott Lights, in the UK, one for A4 size prints is about £50 and an A3 size about £90.
Terry

Roger,
I don't have any affiliations with Epson at all, but for the Data Color technician to make that statement sounds a bit self serving since they sell profiling tools.
I also have to disagree based on common sense and my experience.
Not only do I use Epson paper, but I have a decent selection of Ilford Glossy and Ilford Pearl. I also have some HP glossy.
My experience shows me that a print on Ilford Smooth Gloss using their profile supplied by Ilford for their paper and my printer, and printing the same image on Epson Prem Glossy using their profile for my printer yields identical prints.
So for me to accept the words ot the technician at Data Color is to throw away the evidence that both profiles produced the same prints.
That leaves us with the choice: both profiles were independently wrong, or  the Data Color guru was trying to push you toward buying some product.

Ilford would strive to make their profiles perfect to ensure that you will like the results and buy more paper.
Epson probably sells more medium and higher end printers than all the rest, and it behooves them to make the profiles accurate for the same reason, a happy customer, buys more ink and paper.

I don't really blame the Data Color guy...  :o   since, many times, I try to ask people to try Qimage Ultimate and hope they like it as much as I do.

Fred

Thanks, Terry. My Spyder puck has an ambient light measuring capability, so the profile suits the ambient light at the time I made it, but of course if the light changes dramatically during use, as it does throughout the day, then the profile will not always be suitable. I am thinking of making two profiles, a dim light one and a bright light one. But I'm already at the place of diminishing returns. The photo club meet at which I have to present two prints for adjudication is tomorrow, and I'm ready for that. As ready as I'll ever be, anyway. And it's possible to get too fussy about print quality. Frankly I'd rather be out taking photos than fussing over prints in a darkened room. <sigh> But the Epson people also recommended using a monitor hood, and all their monitors had them. I'll have to see what I can do...

On the other hand I find I am getting pretty consistent results preparing the images in PS, transferring them to Qimage U for printing, and adding 3 to 5%"fill" as a filter. This gives me prints that are quite close to the PS image but lighter than looks good with Qimage. So I might just do that, if it turns out that this is consistent.

Ott lights at 50GBP look a little too expensive for me right now. Maybe for my birthday in August? Everything is usually more expensive here in Japan even though our VAT is only 5% for now (going up to 10% shortly, though).

Hi Roger,
I personally don't think that is a good idea because, as you say ambient varies so much in everyday conditions and it seems impractical to make different prints for different conditions as a general rule. It may be justified for a print that is going to hang in an unusual environment for some while.
My calibration device can measure ambient too but I never use it because the readings vary so much.
I like to work to a standard and the Ott light gives me that as a "cheap" alternative to a professional viewing booth. I'm fortunate in that my work flow produces consistent print compared to screen so it's not often I have to check now.
My photographic club uses a daylight viewing stand in a darkened room for print judging; the brightness must be ok. as mine, and other prints, always look as they should under it. You can more problems with projected images; it's not uncommon for them to be too bright.
Terry

My problem is getting the prints to look like they do on the monitor. The ones that do, look pretty good under all kinds of lighting, but the ones that don't, look bad under almost all lighting! I was hoping that by having the monitor calibrated for when I use it under extremely bright conditions, and again for our usual evening low-light conditions, I could get consistent prints!

But now I've had a different idea. I note the brightness setting that Spyder tells me gives 90CD/MSQ and the one it says gives me 120CD/MSQ as percentages on my LCD monitor controls. Spyder instructions tell you never to alter the settings once you have calibrated the monitor, but if I just note and use the monitor brightness control and set it to the two different percentages (they are about 53% and 94% respectively) then I can make the monitor dim or bright as appropriate and (hopefully) get consistent prints. "Dim" just generally seems better all round, so I may just stick with that. There may be some secondary effects, i.e., changing the brightness may slightly modify the spectral response, but I do notice that the colour gamut shows IDENTICAL coverage of colour space, very close to Adobe RBB, for both the 90 and the 120 calibrations, so I'll take that chance.

Roger,
You are reversed!
You should be trying to get the monitor to look like the prints, not trying to make the prints look like the monitor


I think you are getting close though.
If you choose the lower setting, the one that works out to be about 53% on your software, and stay with it, and then profile the monitor,You should be very close.

Then just do the color profiling part of the process.

Good topic.

Freed

Fred, sorry for the delay in this reply. Several things came up that kept me away from the computer. Hope you're still in the loop. I seem to have misled you. My desire to make the monitor and the prints look like each other naturally and inevitably requires that I have a monitor that shows images which will THEN result in prints that look as near the same as possible on both screen and paper, considering the different contrast range, etc., of additive and subtractive images. The monitor has to come first. The only reason for trying to tweak the monitor so that it looked like my best prints was to try to get a handle on what settings would give me a consistently achievable likeness in other, later, prints from the same monitor. As I see images FIRST on the monitor and THEN as prints, I have to make all my tweaks on the image I see on the screen! So I want to set and forget the monitor profile.

I am now pretty happy with the print quality I am getting, and Qimage is a major help. I have settled on 90cd/sqm as the best compromise monitor profile brightness, with +3 "fill" applied at print time by Qimage. By the way, I was disappointed with the reception given to my prints at the first photo club meeting. Neither got even a "mention" in the rankings and one elderly expert kindly suggested I might like to bring along some more snaps at their next meeting. Argh! One problem I have in relating to other photographers is that most of my efforts go into making VR panoramas (you can see some at Microsoft's photosynth.net site in the "Rogerama" collection). But now I can produce prints with consistently high quality I am getting a lot more fun out of the more conventional side of photography. I've been going back over the last few years looking at the "snaps" I took on the side at various panorama shoots, and printing them. For the next photo club meet I will be taking along a triptych I took of the London "Big Eye" ferris wheel, from along the embankment, from the top of the ride, and looking up through the structure from ground level. Let's see what they think of that. The prints are--though I says it mesel' what didn't oughta--quite beautiful.

Hi Roger,
What you describe is a work flow but there are two independent processes taking place.
The first is what appears on the monitor and is controlled by the monitor settings and its profile; the second is the print controlled by the driver settings and the printer profile.
With particular reference to monitor brightness and dark prints: -
You don't/cannot normally adjust a printer profile so that is fixed, in other words the print is the bench mark. The only thing left to adjust is the monitor that is why Fred said make the monitor look like the prints.
I used to do that but a new monitor seemed to make the need to do that disappear.
Terry

Wow, yes. I think I finally got it. Thanks, Terry. What you are saying is, if the printer/paper profile I have painstakingly prepared by reading several hundred colour patches results in dark prints, adjust the monitor until it shows dark images! I had both parts of the problem clear, but I was taking the work flow as the decisive factor in deciding the order in which to settle them. But I do think I got the monitor problem right: calibrating it for a brightness that is higher than I really need.

It could also have something to do with the angle at which I view the screen. In the "advanced" tools that came with my upgrade of the Spyder profiler there is one to measure the evenness of the screen illumination. Mine is much dimmer in some areas than others (it's a low-price DELL 22" LCD) so it matters where the important image content comes, as the calibration is only true for the narrow central region of the screen. This interacts with the added loss of brightness you get when you are looking at the screen at an angle. <sigh> NOTHING about colour management is simple. That's why it's SO MUCH FUN. (Ha ha!). This year I upgraded my computer. Next year (she-who-must-be-obeyed permitting) I will upgrade my display.

Great forum. Great help. Great product!

Hi Roger,
Change of subject here  ::)
I've had a look at your stitched images & pano's etc. Very good and interesting locations!  8)
What software do you use for stitching?
In recent months I have been "playing" with stitched images and using Microsoft Ice, not as dramatic as yours though.
Photosynths http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=terrym12&content=Synths
Gallery: http://www.pbase.com/tjm04/panos
I find Elderly experts can be stuck in their ways, not that applies to me or Fred of course  ;D Just enjoy your photography and making prints; if a judge likes one, great, but if not, that's only his or her opinion. Has your club got a web site? Mine's here http://www.dunchurchps.com/content/index.php
Terry

Sorry for my delay.
I am in a different time zone from Terry, and I don't speak metric like Terry does.
Nevertheless, you got it!
That's what we were trying to impart.  The separate and independent parts of making the print and the monitor match.
You must think of it this way. If you have Qimage on screen, prints in the queue,, ready to print, and the monitor went up in smoke, you could conceivably unplug the monitor, run to the nearest store, procure a new monitor, a good one, of a temporary junk monitor, plug it in, and make your print, the print would print the same with either monitor.


This quote makes me want to ask if you shoot Raw or JPG, and are your images going from camera to computer or from camera to some application that makes your images into a "developed" state before they are saved to the computer?

Glad you have returned.

While you were away, I had some time, so I resurrected my Profile Prism and profiled some HP paper that I use in my Epson R 1800.
This might be interesting to you also.

http://ddisoftware.com/tech/profile-prism/return-to-prism/msg11484/#msg11484

Fred

Roger,
  Terry and Fred pretty much covered the issue and it seems your doing better now.
I would just like to add one more thought...
  No matter how good your profiles are, or how good your on screen soft proof may appear, it is often necessary to tweak a file according to a test print.
  There are still other variables involved in producing the final product, and there is nothing that compares to holding that print in your hand and making sure that what your seeing  is what your vision or intent was for it ;-)

Happy printing,
David

AMEN-David!

Glad you are still around... I'll answer your questions in order.

I shoot RAW, although for a few years after my first switch to a digital work flow from film/scan/digital darkroom I couldn't see any advantage in the larger RAW files. That was probably because my RAW development skills were quite rudimentary. In-camera development is generally pretty good, but of course there are other perfectly good reasons for shooting RAW and I've been doing it for years, already.

I use DXO to develop the RAW images. It provides several camera/lens-specific modules that give excellent results with default settings, and offers a host of fine-tuning "tweaks" that I have gradually learned to use effectively. I can't imagine using anything else. I process them into TIFFs, and do any additional tweaking that needs functions not provided (or not quite so well) in DXO using PS plugins like Power Retouche (which has a truly excellent sharpening function) and Topaz (which does a remarkable job of noise reduction). I was astonished to see a printing program like QU atempting to work with RAW files and am not tempted to play with this. As I have mentioned, my main interest is 360 x 180 virtual reality panoramas and I produce these from the TIFFs of multiple fisheye images. Printing just doesn't come into it as there's no way you can map a full panorama image of this kind to a flat surface. <sad smile> The wider dynamic range of TIFF images is an advantage for stitching panoramas, as you always have to stitch images taken both with AND against the light, and the DR can be H. <grin>

As for Profile Prism, I looked into that. If I got it right, it depends upon using a scanner. Years ago, I remember using an HP standard colour target with an HP scanner in this way, but although I read your post and the thread with interest, I don't really see the point of introducing yet another variable--a scanner--into the profiling process. However, I am open to persuasion, as I still have an excellent but recently untouched scanner and even a Vuescan license somewhere.

Welcome change of subject. Hope we don't have any thread hijack police watching, though...

Thank you for the encouraging comment. I have been fortunate in visiting some very photogenic locations, and panoramas are an ideal medium for someone with modest photographic skills but considerable computer experience. I really enjoyed your gallery. How beautiful England is, given good weather. My wife and I will be visiting Scotland and England (London and the West of England) towards the end of June. One of the pleasures that QU has given me is to create better prints from our honeymoon in England nearly four years ago.

I think you should try PTgui for stitching panoramas. The idea of someone using anything else for stitching multiple rows of shots makes me wince. It is a rich and extremely flexible program with lots of fine tweaking available "under the hood" but a fairly simple wizard mode to help you get started. There's a free trial version. I thoroughly recommend it. I've been using it since v2.0 and I think it's up to v9.3 now!

To give you an idea how good the support mailing list for PTgui is, I recommended QU to a friend who belongs to it by saying "QU support is as good as PTgui's." I also know a few wrinkles myself and would be glad to share them although it doesn't look as if you need any help! To see some of my more more conventional photography, some dating back to when I was shooting film using rangefinders and manual SLRs, you might like to visit www.usefilm.com/member/roger. To see the photos at maximum size you have to register, but it's pretty painless and I assure you no spam or unwanted mail generation will follow.

Hi Roger,
You sound so busy, and I might say, happy!

The reason I mentioned Profile Prism is due to the fact that you mentioned profiling your printer and papers using the Data Color Spyder 4 (Pro, Elite, Express), using a colorimeter, and as far as I can tell from reading their product data, none of the Spyders does paper printing profiles.  (See quote above)

They do make a product called Spyder Studio, and a less expensive, Spyder Print that works on printer/paper profiling.
If you do have either of those, I would appreciate to hear what you think of the product and the results.

Just chatting...

Fred

Aha! It shows, does it? Well, I'm that unusual thing, an old-age pensioner who is also a newly wed. Well, three-and-a-half years into a marriage with a wonderful and much younger Japanese woman, anyway. That might have something to do with it. <shy smile>


This is a misunderstanding. One of the two Spyder products I have is their printer/paper profiler, which is a colorimeter. The other is their monitor profiler. Their site is admittedly a little confusing and they have a plethora of very similar product names. The colorimeter is really quite expensive bought new but as I wrote in an earlier post I got mine second hand. I nearly had a fit last month when it completely refused to work; seemed quite dead. The local rep here in Japan said they couldn't repair it even if I had been inside the guarantee period and offered me a discount off a new one. However, I noticed in a description of available software upgrades on their site that the latest was to cure failures to initialize properly on Windows 7 64-bit computers like mine. When I downloaded and installed the upgrade it started working again. Phew! The discounted price was higher than the price I paid second hand, so it didn't look too attractive. And She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed would have resisted a repeat purchase for something I use very infrequently.

Although I have the exact same colorimeter sensor as is used inside their latest paper/printer profiler, and use the current software, I do not have the latest MODEL, which comes mated with a special template that constrains the device to run precisely over the printed colour tabs on the  printed page. This, I imagine, is very convenient for speeding things along. I, with the earlier model, have to place the device accurately over each tab and depress it to take the individual measurements. This is not particularly hard, but it does get a bit tiring when you have to do it 256 times (or more, if you want to do complete grey-scale profiling as well as colour). I did, and am delighted with both the coloured and B&W prints I am getting.

The software is pretty easy to follow, with lots of help, and SHOULD be followed. If you assume you don't need to read it, you can pretty soon get out of your depth. Or at least I did. Once I buckled down to following the instructions it was straightforward.

Their support is superb. Fast, knowledgeable, easy to follow and patient with people who don't get the expected results. "Oh, if you are seeing that, you probably selected the wrong intent." (Then followed a reference to where I could learn about printing intents, the details of the intent I should be using, and where to select it in PhotoShop.) Very impressive. Right on the nail!

And to be fair, although they said they couldn't repair a device, they said this was because their calibration process was very detailed and complex and they would never be sure that something that had gone wrong once wouldn't drift out of kilter in future, so they have a no-questions-asked policy of replacing a problem device with a new one inside the guarantee period. And the discount offer was pretty generous... seeing as I had bought mine second hand!

Hope that answers your question.

Yes thank you. I have the complete picture.  ;D

Once you posted the little selection above, I paid no more attention to the colorimeter after that!!  ;) ;) ;) ;)

Really, thanks a lot! Good info.

Fred

Fred,

I normally take great care to optimise the sharpening of my images for the actual size of print I am going to make (and looking at the same size image on screen), and I see there are two places where QU sharpening settings can be made. One is in the overall settings page that includes all the other adjustments, and seems to function just like a straightforward USM, but the other is in the actual print details, you know--the one that has 5% as the default. I take care of USM in other software, but don't understand what the latter one does...

I tried this for the first time yesterday, and I got a perfectly sharpened print. Are these alternatives, supplementary, or what? How do they interact?

Please share your thoughts on this...

Hi roger,
First of all the USM when used as a plain ordinary USM, is still extraordinary since it offers an Equalizer slider.... ( to be explained later if necessary)

So you would use the USM to suite yourself as you normally do, and make the screen image just perfect.
Now we go to print!
Different printers have different results with regard to sharpening and looking sharp on paper.
Some print sharper than others. Some papers tend to print sharper than others.

The Smart sharpen is your setting (default 5 is usually just about right anyway) for compensating for the loss of sharpness between screen and print paper.
It also compensates for the size of the print!!!! AUTOMATICALLY
That's why you bought QU. It takes all the worry away.

... Have you tried the Tone Targeted Sharpening?
Fred

Dear Fred,


Yes, thanks, but I have already found that and used it to avoid sharpening the skin tones on my wife's face (she is very conscious of some freckles, which are not considered attractive among Japanese). Apart from that, which is a really useful function, I must say I never use USM for sharpening. Instead I use the sharpening plugin in the Power Retouche set, which is worth acquiring on its own if you don't want the others in the set. Just as I wouldn't use anything but DXO for RAW development I wouldn't think of using anything else for sharpening. It takes a while to find out how all the variables affect the final result (as USM does, of course, but this is an order of magnitude more complex as it includes all the standard USM parameters plus things like edge treatment). But once you have found out how the settings work, it is hard to beat.

Power Retouche is a two-edged sword, though. These plugins have largely insulated me from the complexities of PhotoShop, which I have never mastered and probably never will. They are too convenient! For instance, the B&W conversion settings are all I ever use to produce B&W images from my colour shots, which I usually tailor to reproduce the look of Tri-X developed in D76 with the appropriate filter, usually yellow x2 but sometimes green x3 or orange x4. DXO make a rather expensive plugin dedicated to this but I am not even tempted to try the free demo version.

But the idea of having the printer driver handle sharpening at different print sizes? That is completely new to me! And by gum it works! I have an A4 print of a street scene in Camden town (taken on our honeymoon but printed for the first time yesterday) that is beautifully sharp, renders colours very close to those I see on my display, and with a full range of tones from a lovely deep black to paper white. Thank you, Qimage!!

With the LCD monitor set to 90CD/sqm I still need a slight boost to "fill" (3% or so) to get this print quality. With your help, it didn't take long to get this kind of satisfying result! Incidentally, I notice great improvements in the results I am getting from my Epson PM-4000PX with the latest Epson papers and inks. At first I had to use matte or semi-matte paper and got a lot of bronzing, but now I can use glossy paper. There is a very slight loss of glossiness in paper-white highlights, barely noticeable, which implies that the inks are laying down additional gloss. And the colours are quite satisfactorily saturated for my taste. The only slight reservation I have about this aging printer is that it uses up light magenta, and to a lesser extent, light cyan and yellow, faster than the other colours--I am noticing more-or-less DOUBLE the rate in my diary of printing costs.

Roger,
My wife would trade wrinkles for freckles any day of the week.
Me too!

Enjoy!

Fred