Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I have calibrated my monitor using SpyderX Elite as well as DisplayCal.  The images from either calibration look good on the screen but always print with measurably less red and more blue.

Just for comparison, I printed the same image using Photoshop Elements native print module and it is actually a bit closer to what I'm seeing on the screen, although still noticeably off.  Additionally, the QImage colors seem to be 'harsher', as though the image was overedited.

Looking for ideas here.

Thanks

You told us a little about your monitor's calibration but nothing about the printer: your monitor's calibration has no effect on printing.  What printer are you using?  What paper?  What printer profile are you using?  Where did the images come from (the ones you are printing) and what type of images are they (TIFF, JPEG, raw, etc.)

P.S.  Qimage, Photoshop, Lightroom, and all software that is color managed will print identical color IF you have the programs set up the same way.  If you see a difference between PSE and QU, there is a difference in either the software settings or the driver settings.  There's an article right here on this forum about that.  It's over a decade old but still applies:

https://ddisoftware.com/tech/articles/may-2011-printing-the-same-colors-in-qimage-ultimate-and-photoshop/

Regards,
Mike

Right!

Canon Pixma Pro-200
Canon Photo Paper Pro Luster
ICC Profile as loaded with the Canon printer driver

I have tried all 4 rendering intents (PSE seemed to do best with absolute colorimetric, QIU with saturation!!).
I'm viewing the various images in window light, 6500K LED and 4000K LED.  Certain times of the day for the daylight viewing and the 4000K LED give the best results, although still significantly colder than the screen.

For one set of images I'm using the standard Matrix image supplied with the SpyderX software.  It's a JPEG.  Other images, particularly the QIU 'harsh' ones, were TIFF files post-processed from my own RAWs (Sony A7C) and edited in and exported from the latest version of Capture One Pro.  I exported the TIFFs with Adobe RGB (1998) as the embedded color space.  The JPEGs were closer than the TIFFs, although again a noticeable difference from their respective screen images.

While I thought I had made sure all settings were identical between PSE and QIU, I will double check.  I will also try the test for a corrupted profile as discussed in the reference article.

Thanks

Based on your reply, I have some things to suggest.  First, I would suggest not playing with the rendering intents: set everything to Relative Colorimetric with Black Point Compensation turned on.  That will produce the most accurate color.  If you start mixing and comparing absolute and saturation, it will just complicate things and those are generally not to be used with photos anyway.

Next, in Qimage make sure you drop down Printer Profile on the main window and select "Suggest printer profiles...".  The profile for "Canon Pro-200 Photo Paper Pro Luster" will likely be the top selection in the list: just verify that and double click that profile to select it, in the next window verify Relative Colorimetric and Black Point Compensation on, and click "OK".  This will allow Qimage to do the color management using the proper profile: you don't want the driver doing that.

Finally, be sure to let your eyes adjust to the white of the paper and the white of the screen.  You can never hold a print up to the screen and get the exact same white balance because papers have optical brighteners that make the white of the paper "blue" in comparison to many surroundings.  Each has to be viewed within the realm of their own whitepoint: screen vs paper.

Regards,
Mike

I wanted to check the profile integrity as pointed out in the article you referenced.  However, I only have Photoshop Elements and that doesn't seem to have BPC controls.

I switched to Red River Palo Duro Satin since I have a lot of that laying around in 5x7.

Using their downloaded profile and Relative Colorimetric and BPC checked, the image produced by QIU is really pretty awful compared to the soft proof.  The soft proof looks pretty good in terms of skin color, clothing color etc.

The skin tones in the print might be best described as being 'drained', 'ashen', 'grey', etc.

One thing I'd like to understand better relates to viewing conditions.  I built the monitor profile using the monitor's native 6500K setting as directed by the Spyder software.  Using that setting to look at the soft proofs yields pretty good results.

But if I switch the monitor back to sRGB to view the soft proof and hold the print into direct afternoon sunlight, things line up better.

I'm pretty confused here as to how to proceed here.

Thanks

Hello, I've using QU for years with a calibrated Eizo monitor and mostly custom printer profiles for a range of Epson and Ilford papers. Monitor and prints match very well.
I'll just say this, the monitor should match the print, not the other way round when using full colour managed printing. I've hardly ever had an issue with colour matching, all I've done is adusted the MONITOR brightness to match the test print and then re-calibrated the monitor. I use 6500k for the monitor.

Have you checked the printer for blocked nozzles? If OK then it seems the paper profile is not good. Try some fresh paper of a different brand, eg Espson if an Epson printer. Also us some standard test images.
I hope this helps in some way.

Terry

Did a nozzle check and that was OK.

Where did you get your custom profiles?  Why didn’t you use the manufacturer’s profiles?

Terry is right: we match the monitor to the print.  But to do that, we have to have a good test print and we need to print with OEM ink on OEM paper using an OEM profile.  That's the best way to not get lost in the rabbit hole.

Which reminds me.  No one asked, but I hope you are not using third party inks and you are using genuine Canon inks.  All of this goes out the window if you are using third party inks and you need a good printer profiling tool to create your own profiles if you are.

This is a test image that is freely available in many places online.  Many people use this as a test:

https://www.ddisoftware.com/misc/PrinterEvaluationImage_V002_ProPhoto.tif

The task here is to print the above test image:

(1) Select your Canon Pro-200 and select a Canon media type that you have on hand.  Let's say Canon Pro Luster.
(2) Drop down Printer Profile and select "Suggest printer profiles" and select and open the Pro-200 Pro Luster profile (should be the first or second one on the list).
(3) Once the profile is selected, make sure the settings are Relative Colorimetric, BPC on, and click "OK".
(4) Add the above test image and print.

Provided the printer is in good working order, you are using OEM inks, and you haven't turned Driver AI off in Qimage, you should get a good test print.  If it doesn't match the monitor, the monitor needs to be adjusted.

Regards,
Mike

Yes, strictly Canon inks!

Will try your image later this morning and report back.

Thanks

That's the same test image I use. Once you have the printing sorted out, work on the monitor, not the other way 'round. Qimage is really good at preventing double profiling and other weirdness. The other day I changed papers and got the setup wrong. Qimage instantly recognized the problem and applied the necessary fixes. I wouldn't have noticed otherwise until I wasted paper.

BTW, adjusting the monitor to the print is what I was doing. But I have posed this same issue to the SpyderX team and they were horrified!!

Their advice is that “the calibration is the calibration”. That’s why I came here for help.

Hence my confusion.

Yes that is right but monitor calibration in my experience does not set brightness. If too bright, colours will look washed out.

I'm in the UK. I used a local small company but there other national ones around who do it. I've always found custom profiles are better than those provided by paper and printer manufacturers. That was some time ago so they may have improved.
Terry

So, you don’t adjust the colors of the monitor profile?  Just the brightness?

My problem is with the colors. Brightness I’m OK on.

Thanks

It's not typically a big deal.  You profile your monitor and if the monitor looks brighter than your print, you turn down the monitor brightness and reprofile at the new (lower) brightness until you get the overall brightness to match the print.  You shouldn't have to do any more than that.  The reason we adjust the monitor to match the print is that your monitor supplies its own light and can adjust brightness, color temperature, etc.  With prints you are limited to your viewing environment since prints are illuminated from an external light source that you have limited control over.

But given that your eyes will adjust to any color temperature light, you really only need to profile the monitor and printer and then it is often necessary to turn down the brightness of the monitor and reprofile until it matches the "brightness" of the print in your lighting.  Brightness is a hard thing to get right even for monitor profiling tools because it depends on ambient lighting which can be affected by time of day and even monitor viewing angle and positioning of the ambient light and how it hits the screen.

Mike

I used your test image and adjusted the monitor profile to the point where I think they're a very good match.  Those settings also work for Datacolor's test image.  (The Spyder folks wouldn't be happy!)

However, when it's my own images, the results just don't match up.  My prints look as though the Clarity slider has been ramped up.  The images are 'harsh'.  The skin tones are bluer and the blue clothing is more saturated.

I'm looking at the soft proof mode in both Capture One and QIU using the same manufacturer ICC profile.  For your test image and Datacolor's test image, the results are pretty close.  But, again, looking at my own image, there is a noticeable difference between the two apps.  (I'm exporting from C1 to QIU as a 16-bit TIFF file with the Adobe RGB (1998) profile embedded in the image.)

OK.  This is why we go one step at a time.  You always want to adjust to some sort of standard test.  Once you get that right, only then do you move to evaluating your own images because your images could have some unknown issue and they often come from one of many programs: in your case, Capture One.

So having good results from the test image (which is in ProPhoto color space and should be much more demanding than your own photos), we need to look at your photos and the process used to create them.  In converting images to Adobe RGB and saving them as 16 bit TIFFs from Capture One, there are several things that can go wrong:

(1) The color conversion to Adobe RGB could have been done wrong or Capture One could have an issue where the conversion didn't work properly.

(2) The conversion to Adobe RGB could have worked but something went wrong in embedding Adobe RGB in the TIFF and now Qimage isn't picking up the Adobe RGB tag.

(3) The conversion to Adobe RGB could have worked as well as the tagging of the TIFF, but Capture One may not have an accurate profile for the camera you are using and the original color could have been messed up.  Normally you would see this directly in Capture One while you are using it though: it'd look bad in C1.

The first thing I would do is hold your mouse over one of the thumbnails in Qimage and look at the EXIF hotbar at the very bottom of the Qimage window: see if it indicates Adobe RGB as the color space.

Next, you might want to upload a sample image somewhere that we can download it and see if there are other problems with it.  It is often hard to describe things like oversaturated/dull colors and to what extent we are talking about.  We don't know whether you are talking about subtle differences or differences that are so bad it makes the images look solarized.  The only way to determine that is to have a sample image.

P.S.  You do know that Qimage has the capability of viewing your raws without converting them to TIFFs in Capture One since Qimage supports almost every camera.  What do the raws look like in Qimage if you just view the raws directly?  Honestly, Qimage will likely do as good or better at developing your raws as Capture One anyway.  So even if you prefer Capture One, at least that's a way of testing things.

Mike

I loaded a RAW directly into QIU and printed it with no manipulation.  (Same monitor ICC as for matching your test image.)  Same results:  the print is very much different than QIU's soft proof.

Again, the print looks like I pushed up the clarity slider.

How can I send you the RAW?  It's 26mb zipped.  If you don't have a direct upload site, I can use one of the large file services.  If so, what email?

I don't really need the image if you tried it directly in Qimage and you are telling me that:

(1) The soft proof looks good and
(2) Pressing spacebar on the thumbnail to view the image full screen also looks good

If so, then everything relative to the monitor is OK and only the print is bad and now we are down to a problem with the printer itself.  Since the soft proof shows a simulation of what the print should look like, if the print looks nothing like that soft proof, the printer is not producing the result that it should.  There are only a few ways that can happen when using OEM inks on OEM paper (like the Canon Luster you mentioned):

(1) You are using the wrong paper or printing on the wrong side of the paper
(2) You chose the wrong printer profile
(3) The printer has a physical problem where it isn't delivering ink like it should
(4) You turned some of Qimage's Driver AI features off: with them on, it is impossible to get color management settings wrong in the driver

The only thing confusing about any of this is you said the test image looked good but your own images don't.  That makes no sense since that test image has a broader color range than your images will have and basically covers all the colors that would be present in any of your own images.  Technically if you really got the test image to match, there is no way your own images won't.

Mike

Yes to all your points here.  That's why I'm so terribly confused with my results.

As an FYI, the image that I'm dealing with is a headshot against a black background that occupies well over half the image.  Oher than the skin tones of the face, there's an evenly colored blue sweatshirt and an evenly colored green shirt collar in the image.  The skin tones look 'harsh', as though the clarity slider was pushed up, the green of the shirt looks pretty accurate, and the blue sweatshirt is a significantly deeper (saturated?) shade than what shows on the screen.

If it's not too much of a problem, I'd still like to send you the TIFF that I'm working with to see if you can or can't repro the issue on your end.

Thx

Easiest way is to just put it on Google drive and post the shareable link.

Mike

Shared with mchaney@ddisoftware.com.

Looks good to me.  I printed a copy on my Canon G620 and one on my Epson ET-8550.  Both look like a good match to the monitor.  Depending on the lighting, the one on the monitor actually might have just a hint more saturation than both of the prints so comparing the prints to the monitor, the prints are definitely not more saturated.  The blue sweatshirt is a VERY saturated blue and that shows in all three versions: monitor, G620 print, and ET-8550 print.

Mike

Hmmm. On my monitor, I cannot match the saturation of the sweatshirt at all. I’ve tried with simple blue gain adjustments, but I guess I’ll go into the video card and work with its blue gamma next.

On my monitor the facial tones are fairly smooth, but on my prints they lack that smooth gradation. They are harsh. How do the skin tones look on your prints?

Very realistic with a little ruddiness (redness) under the eyes and a hint on the bridge of the nose and cheeks.  Same on the monitor.

Mike

Well, I certainly appreciate your help here.  I'm pretty well mystified and will continue to experiment.

It's interesting that all of your surfaces show the same saturated blue.  Only my print does.  That sort of indicates it's the monitor that's at issue here since we agree on the print.  I have a couple of other monitors in the house that I'll try calibrating and see what they produce.

I won't take any more of your time on this and thanks again for your inputs.

Bob

I was curious so I looked at the color gamut of the Pro-200 on Canon Luster paper compared to the sRGB that most common (not high end) monitors are close to.  The Pro-200 on Luster paper actually has a significantly larger color gamut on the blue side (see attached).

So... it is possible that your monitor (which is probably close to sRGB in gamut unless you have a specialized monitor) can't display that shade of blue.  In other words that blue may be out of gamut for the monitor but NOT the printer which may explain why the monitor doesn't display it as vibrant.

It is important to not focus or get hung up on one color or image which is why the test images are often a better indicator.  If your monitor OR printer profiles aren't the best, it is often easy to end up pushing images to the point where they have out-of-gamut colors while the original didn't.

Now the skin tones are a different story: those are almost never out of gamut so if the skin tones look different from monitor to print, that is reason to believe there is room for improvement either in the monitor profile (most likely) or maybe getting a custom printer profile if the supplied Canon profile isn't doing it justice.

Mike

Well, that certainly makes sense. 

Per your suggestion, I will recalibrate tonight when it's dark and then concentrate strictly on the skin tones.  They were pretty consistently showing somewhat redder on the screen than on the prints.

The monitor theoretically has native modes for sRGB, AdobeRGB, 6500K, sRGB 50, DCI-P3 D63, etc.  I have been leaving it on 6500K since I was under the impression that's what the monitor profile was generated with.  I will try some of the others.

I also ended up with an old SpyderPrint kit and will experiment with doing my own paper profile as well.  (Retired, have lots of time!)

Note that QIU did not show out of gamut warnings on the sweatshirt in soft proof mode.

Will report back sometime tomorrow.

Thanks!

I like having soft proof and out of gamut warnings available but don't get too hung up on them. The printed output is what you hang your hat on.

Gamut warning only show out of gamut for the printer.  It will not show if it is out of gamut for the monitor: only if it is out of gamut for the printer.

Mike

Got it.  Thanks.