So I take some photos, edit them in my editor (Photoshop Elements) and print them out on my New(er) Epson photo printer. The problem seems to be that the gray and black colors always appear much darker in the print then they do on my monitor. So I'll spend an hour or two editing a photo, to print it out and have it look horrid because the dramatic shadows I was trying to create are now just blobs or streaks of black - this also happens with the grays too.. (or just some darker colors that might mix with gray). I was thinking I need to calibrate my monitor, but I haven't the slightest how. So I did some looking and found that you can't really calibrate a laptop monitor. (or you can, but its very expensive?) Is there anything I can do to reproduce colors better on my printer or on my monitor so they appear as they do on my printer? I notice this also sometimes happens (not always) when I share my photos on a friends monitor. Are there any procedures I should follow in order to correctly reproduce colors? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks blades!
its your printer.. printer never really print good colors unless u got those 1,000 dollars printers that can print like professinal,
no.. you don't need $1000 printers to get good results. You're right that you'll need to calibrate your monitor to get accurate printing results. You need a calibration devise like the Spyder II. It's true that not all lap top monitors can be calibrated though, so you'll have to find out if yours can be.
Most laptop screens or LCD's cannot be calibrated. There are some software proggies that can adjust color on LCD's but I don't recall if any are free. I will look around and if I find one I'll post it here. It's the newer liquid organics that can be calibrated. Your simplest solution is to plug a monitor into your laptop. All laptops have a monitor jack in the back. Get an inexpensive monitor to plug into it. Or if you already have one around the house you're good to go.. You can also go into your printers options and adjust how much black it uses, and the saturation level. Both of these tips should be helpful. Most of all the printer settings. I would play around with them first. Sometimes the saturation and black levels come factory preset a little to high. Hope this helps. ( Looks Over Shoulder for Eleven357 )
If your on a pc go "start button, control panel click on the adobe gamma thingy and go thru the steps unless you dont have it in your control panel then I don't know what you can do.
Thanks for all the help. I'm going to try some of these things now and see if it helps. I wish there was an easier way, I don't know if we have a CRT monitor tube anymore, I think all the ones in the house are now LCD. I'll have to check though. I'll also try the printer settings as well. Hopefully they will remedy the situation *crosses fingers* If anyone knows of anything else though, please share!
This site has a lot of info on Color Management: http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/color_management.htm
Thanks, I gave part of it a read earlier and will try to read the rest tomorrow. Go figure I have almost no ink left so I don't want to try things out until I can get some new cartridges. I figure if I try it now and run out of ink I'll need to print something important and wont have any, so I always keep the last bit for emergencies unless I have extra cartridges.