Monitor color/temperature balance

Greetings all,

Technical background info: D5000, NEF files, tone and color work done in LR. Macbook with an HP ZR 24w monitor. Spyder3Elite which I use religiously, including the ambient light monitor.

Problem: My prints (mpix and a local professional lab) are coming out dark. I emailed with (unfortunately, he wasn't there when I went in) the technical guy at my local lab and with mpix. I never got to a place of resolution with either of them and have some questions before I go back to them again.

I am working in 2.2 gamma, which I understand to be native to the computer but not necessarily to the monitor but also not necessarily the biggest issue in terms of the darkness problem. Using sRGB. I was calibrating the white balance to 6500K at the request of the Spyder. Both places seemed somewhat surprised at that and thought it should be more like 5000 or 5500K. So, for an order that needed to get out I did that, (can't remember which because I'm not in front of the monitor now but only one was available) lightened it up a bit in LR (if I remember correctly in the tone curve) - still looked a little bit bright to my eye on the monitor but printed ok. I didn't think, in my rush, to print one of each (the original done on the 6500 and the other).

So, what temperature is appropriate?

Also, what about adjusting the brightness for while I'm working. The spyder wants me to bring it way down for the calibration but I'm just unable to work at that level and remember reading (in my long search for which monitor and calibration device to buy) that it was ok to calibrate an then move to where you're comfortable working. Even tho that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I've started not following the spyder's directions to bring it down but that doesn't seem to make a difference in the final product.

Sorry for rambling on so long. Truly appreciate any advice.

Tags: calibration, monitor, temperature

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Permalink Reply by Gary Vernon on January 22, 2012 at 8:42am

Hi Julie,

a white point of 6500K is fine and it is actually the native white point of that particular HP monitor.

It can be difficult calibrating one monitor without having a reliable 'reference monitor' side by side for comparison tests.

I have had a few recent problems myself with color shift etc so tomorrow i'm blowing my budget on the self calibrating 27" Eizo: http://www.ephotozine.com/article/eizo-coloredge-cg275w-15774

You will get more luck if you post this question on the Input / Output / Workflow forum at retouchpro.com

The calibration guru guy to speak to is Andrew Rodney and as well as writing a few books on this subject also works as an adviser for Adobe.

The link is here:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/input-output-workflow/

hope it helps :)

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Permalink Reply by CameraClicker on January 22, 2012 at 12:45pm

I used to shoot slides. Sometimes I would send a slide to a lab to have a print made. They always came out quite dark. Shooting digital and printing on an Epson R1900, I had the same problem. Calibration of everything did not really help. Scott Kelby's advice was if the print is too dark, make it brighter. When I send to print, I run an action that duplicates the layer, sets the new layer to screen mode and opacity to 76%, flattens the image, applies some sharpening, configures print options and finally pushes the file to the printer. When it is ready to go to the printer the file always looks too bright on the monitor. I think the issue is the same as with slides. You view slides and the monitor with the light source provided. You view the print with ambient light, which always seems to look darker.