I have recently printed my first book and it came out much darker than I thought in comparison to the screen. I was slightly disappointed with the end result. Today my husband swapped my monitor with his and when looking at some layouts I had completed on the different monitor I was again disappointed with the result for some of them. The colour was just not right. Should I have the monitor set up with particular settings to get a more accurate result to the final printed page? What settings should I use or is there a program I should be using?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
What company did you use to print your book? Alot of companies will provide a "calibration kit" so you can compare their sample prints with what you see on your screen.
I too am frequently disappointed with colors and darkness of prints. It's probably time that I calibrate my monitor again...
If you Google 'calibrating monitor' with the brand of monitor you have, there are lots of instructions on the internet on how to calibrate. It is pretty simple, just follow the steps. You can still not be pleased with the prints, but at least then you know it's not your monitor and you should start looking for another printing company...
Are you using a desktop or a laptop? I learned from experience that it´s better to stay away from laptops if you want to be sure of color calibration. Remember that thing of the blue/white dress? Sometimes, due to the way your laptop screen works, you may think that you´re using a pink and you´re using a green istead (well, it happened to me once, lol), and the brightness of the colors may not be precise on a laptop screen too.
Another trick that my DH taught me to see if a color will be too dark when printing is to look at the photoshop color screen if it has lots of black in the CMYK% composition. The green in the screenshot below, for example, is almost out of gamut (the yellow marking on the selection screen show the out of gamut shades) but doesn´t tend to be darker because it doesn´t have too many black in its CMYK composition. If it had more than 20 or 25% I´d be concerned and would probably change the green of my costumer´s image...
When I switched from a desktop to a laptop, I was so horrified with the color differences. I found out that there's no way to correct the color differences in the laptop. Like Lorien said, the laptop screen can display certain color casts.
What I have found is that if you tilt the screen on the laptop towards you, you get a better idea of the colors...or at least that's how I do it.
Thanks for the advise ladies. I used shutterfly to print my book as from what I read most people are happy with them and they had a sale on. I will calibrate my monitor so I can see if it makes a difference on the layouts I have done probably will need to anyway as my husband brought a new monitor and somehow I just ended up with his older one. I use a desktop Lorien. Thanks for your trick I'll have to try that out and see what it looks like.
I'd also recommend (if you can budget it) getting a monitor calibration tool called a colorimeter. Using one to create a custom profile for your monitor will help your screen colors be as accurate as possible to the color space; that, in turn, will mean that prints done by almost any decent lab will be a much closer match to what you see on-screen. They're not cheap--somewhere around $100 for an inexpensive one the last time I looked--but are well worth the investment when you're dealing with photos and scrapbooking where you'd like prints to match what you see on the monitor.
If that's out of budget, you can walk through the adjustments at lagom.nl. It'll take you an hour or so, but if you can get through all of it, your display should be showing you a much closer approximation than what you're currently getting. It won't be as accurate as the colorimeter method, since you have to eyeball each chart. That said, it got my monitors pretty close to accurate, and my prints turn out VERY close to what I expect. It's worth the time and seemingly endless adjustments to get it that close.
Remember, though, if you want perfect accuracy, that you'll need to recalibrate every time the light level in the room changes fairly significantly. That's an awful lot of time if you're doing the second method every time. You can avoid that issue by closing blinds and curtains in your computer room or only working in the evenings so that you're always working with a consistent level of artificial light. I've got what's a perfect setup--no windows in my computer room, so it's always consistent; I just check my calibration once a month or so to be sure I haven't bumped something!
Thanks for the advice and link Holly. I think I'll try this out to start and see how it goes. Our budget will hopefully allow for the investment of the program. Photos, memories and scrapbook pages are priceless to me and I think it is worth it especially as it is not cheap to print the books. You want to be happy with the outcome.
A colorimeter isn't just a program--it's an actual device that plugs into your USB port and measures the light output from your screen for a certain set of colors, and then builds a profile from there of where your monitor needs to be told to be a little brighter so the color displays as it's supposed to. And you're right--you want to be happy with the outcome and books aren't cheap to print, so it's well worth the cost!
The best inexpensive (sub-$100) colorimeters are the X-Rite ColorMunki Smile and the Datacolor Spyder4Express, should you decide to go looking into them. They're not super-high-end, but the next step up from them is the $200-250 range and most of us can't afford that much for a few extra features. Granted, those extra features are the difference between 95% color accuracy and 99%, but the 95% you can get out of a $90-100 tool is still a big step up from the prints being noticeably off.