I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction regarding two print-related questions:

• Does anyone know where I could find a free single professional stock photo that would be accurate for testing a new printer? I use an LCD television as my monitor, and although images of all kinds look just fine on it, I've had difficulty in the past printing accurately (the printed image is often darker than what's on the screen). I'd like to be able to print an image that I know is color-accurate and then adjust my screen if necessary.

• Also, someone asked me where to go to have their 3D artwork printed, like for posters or large-sized images suitable for framing. I believe this has been asked before, but I can't find the thread. Could someone recommend what types of places they would need to look into having this done?

Thanks in advance.

SnowS

To the first one -- no matter how much you work your monitor, the printed piece will always seem darker and less saturated. No reason to go into a long, technical discussion, save that your monitor works in RGB, which is an additive form of colour manipulation, while a printer works in CMYK, which is a subtractive form. The monitor works with a much broader gamma, which is a term that describes all the colours it can create, than even the best printer can reproduce. You'll get reasonably close, SS, but you'll never have a complete match.

To the second -- there are several online print shops, like Vistaprint.com, that handle online orders for things like this. But if your friend lives in the States, ask him/her to check out the local Kinko's. It's generally very good quality, on a wide range of stocks, and generally dirt cheap.

"no matter how much you work your monitor, the printed piece will always seem darker and less saturated."

That's simply not true.  Printed images can be darker, lighter, more saturated, less saturated etc.  It depends on your monitor and printer color profile settings.

"Does anyone know where I could find a free single professional stock photo that would be accurate for testing a new printer?"

Google "color calibration" and you should be able to find a color chart you can use.

"I've had difficulty in the past printing accurately (the printed image is often darker than what's on the screen). "

You should be able to make adjustments in your printer software.

The first thing you need to do is make sure your monitor is properly calibrated. The best way is to use a spyder to calibrate your monitor and printer so the color profiles match, though I've never actually tried to do that with a television. I can make prints that most people would have trouble distinguishing the difference of colors and saturation between print and monitor. They will never be exact, but you can get pretty darn close.

Coldrake

Thank you, those tips are of some help. The main difference between my screen and printer is in the brightness, so I'll just try to compensate for it when I print. Thanks for the information.

SnowS

>> That's simply not true.  Printed images can be darker, lighter, more saturated, less saturated etc.  It depends on your monitor and printer color profile settings.

True. What I should have said was, even at its most optimal, it wont match. Yes, there are basic settings you can tinker with, but they have their limits. And all the adjustments and all the calibrating just wont help as much as you think it will, sorry. If you look at the way Photoshop, for example, allows you to make colour choices, it will tell you when you've chosen something that cant be printed (the infamous little yellow triangle), and it will make its best guess as to what it will sorta kinda maybe look like -- and that guess will always seem like a dun, greyed down version of the colour you want.

Yes, the technology has gotten better over the years, but the simple fact remains: a monitor can reproduce over 16 million different colours. Most printers cant -- at its very best, a high end professional laser printer can handle about a quarter million. A monitor can reproduce highly saturated colours like neons or the ones at the far range of colour recognition, like ultraviolets or infrareds. Unless you use a specialty fifth-colour ink, your printer cant -- and even with the specialty ink it's a bit of a crap shoot because you're limited to the hues provided by the suoplier. A monitor can give you a rich, dense black. Unless you make a double pass on a six-colour machine, your printer cant reproduce that either. Monitors will always have a far wider range on which to draw because of the very nature of the way colours are created with light, and when you throw LCD technology into the mix, it's just compounding the issues even more. Screens like that are brighter and sharper than even the best computer monitor, with an even more complex range of colour technology underpinning everything.

The bottom line: you will get reasonably close, probably acceptably enough that most people wont be able to tell much of a difference because it's doubtful they'll hold the printed piece right next to the monitor for comparison. But it will never be completely bang on.

If you still want to pursue this, google "colour bars" and look for that image we all see used on TV sets when they're experiencing "technical difficulty". It has a fairly wide range and should serve you pretty well.

For printing I use www.pictureframes.com.  I've had a couple of large images printed and framed there and people have been very happy with them.   They don't just frame, you can set up your Giclee Editions as well. 

also...if you want more experts, there's a printing forum here, they deal with the artistic-oriented printing (I'm a semi-expert on business-oriented color printers, but I haven't played with anything fancier than an HP 4730...;). They know all that stuff...;)

Long story short, as you see above, color hues, saturation, pixel/dots per inch, etc., are different between screen and page. There's a lot of protocols out there to do an approximation from one to the other. Stop by the Print forum here, they'll probably have some sites. (Heck, I'm probably the only printer tech that uses his own 'artwork' to test printers with..;)

------------------------------------------------------------
coldrake: *"The best way is to use a spyder to calibrate your monitor and printer so the color profiles match,... "

---

uh.... what's a "spyder" please?*

I wondered about what a Spyder was too, apparently it's an actual physical device that sits in front of your monitor and measures color values. Someone probably knows much more about them than I do though.

SnowS

There are a number of devices that will read the screen and calibrate your display. It used to be considered essential for people working to print media . Cost starts around $100 if  i remember correctly.

Attached Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut

I did some work on Colour TV technologies in the '70s, and if you want to make your head spin I can recommend looking up articles about colour gamut or the CIE colour triangle. To generalise, computer monitors can represent more colours than any printing process; yet neither technology can show all the colours that the human eye can perceive (the missing colours are mostly shades of green).

A spyder is physical device which rests on or is suction cupped to your monitor screen and is usually connected to your computer with a usb cord. A spyder can adjust color, brightness, contrast, gamma, white point etc. so that the colors and settings on your monitor are as close to true color as possible. If you have several monitors that are all properly calibrated, an image should look the same on each of them. They'll never look exactly the same, but close enough that most people won't be able to see any difference.

With higher end spyders and software you can set up the same profile on your printer (also your scanner, digital camera, etc.) as on your monitor, so that when you print, your print will match what's on your monitor as close as is possible.

I know a lot of people use Pantone Hueys which I believe are generally less expensive, but I've never used one.

SeanMartin wrote:
*"Yes, there are basic settings you can tinker with, but they have their limits. And all the adjustments and all the calibrating just wont help as much as you think it will, sorry."

If you are talking about your monitor and video card controls, you're probably right. If you're talking about properly calibrating and setting up profiles, you're dead wrong. Sorry.

"If you look at the way Photoshop, for example, allows you to make colour choices, it will tell you when you've chosen something that cant be printed (the infamous little yellow triangle),"

In all the years I've been printing photographs, (and now cgi,) I've never had that happen. As long as I keep everything properly calibrated, I doubt I ever will. That's why I use a spyder and set up my own profiles.

"Unless you use a specialty fifth-colour ink, your printer cant -- and even with the specialty ink it's a bit of a crap shoot because you're limited to the hues provided by the suoplier."

If your printer is only using 4 colors, no, you're not likely to be getting photographic quality prints. My printer uses 8 colors of ink. You'd be surprised at how many hues I can get from mixing 8 different colors. Like I said above, I can make prints that most people would have trouble distinguishing the difference of colors and saturation between print and monitor.

"A monitor can give you a rich, dense black."

So can a printer.

"Unless you make a double pass on a six-colour machine, your printer cant reproduce that either."

If you're printing on typing paper, yeah, you're probably right.

Why do you need a 6 color printer to create a rich dense black? What colors does your printer use to create black? Actually an inexpensive 4 color printer with half way decent paper can produce a rich, dense black. I think you have gray and black mixed up. Inexpensive printers can have trouble with gray tones.

Sean, if you're talking specifically about low end printers, say so. Speaking in generalities like you are is giving people wrong information.

Coldrake

 

>> Why do you need a 6 color printer to create a rich dense black?

Quite simply, because the black used in the CMYK process isnt a true black: it's a very, very dark brown. If you want a deep, rich black, you have to do more than just toss a little cyan in the mix: you have to do a double pass. And no, I'm not talking about low-end printers -- I've seen the results coming off six- and eight-colour Heidelbergs, where I have sometimes spent hours trying to reconcile the image on the screen with the piece coming off the press. And this isnt with some back alley commercial printer -- we're talking about people who have printed work for folks like Levi Strauss, which has some of the most demanding print requirements of any company on the planet. For myself, I come from a graphics background that's included annual reports for major companies, folks who are slightly more finicky about the end result than what I get off some little HP printer from Circuit City.

So no, Colddrake, I do indeed know what I'm talking about. After 20+ years in the graphics industry, I think I might have learned a few things along the way. And I'd hope that the misinformation isnt coming from me. Frankly, anyone who says they've never encountered the Photoshop yellow triangle certainly hasnt gone very deep into the program: even working in CMYK mode, you will find it if you venture beyond the gamma, as the link from EnglishBob demonstrates. Working in CMYK doesnt allow you to look at the effects of fifth colour work, no matter how well your monitor is calibrated. It can give you an approximation of a PMS colour, but even the Pantone folks freely admit that the differences between the colour chip and its CMYK composite are sometimes pretty drastic.

Yes, a lot of it depends on paper stock: a gloss will allow the ink to sit on top far better than a matte stock, which means it's far easier to crank off those deeper, richer tones on C1S stock than photocopy paper. But that doesnt alter the fact that you will have issues reconciling the image on the screen with the printed piece. I'm not saying it's impossible to get from monitor to paper, but it's very, very difficult to achieve 100% parity from one to another.

As I wrote earlier, for most people, the differences are minor. You probably wouldnt even see them. But even if you hold the printed piece next to the monitor, it's going to be difficult to know if you've actually captured it. Sorry, but that's how it is.

And just to throw a little more into the mix...

Can your calibration software adjust for yellow-white coated stock instead of blue-white? Can it tell the difference between the ink result on coated versus uncoated? How about between all the variations within uncoated stocks themselves? After all, something printed on corrugated is going to look very different from something printed on recycled bond. Does your calibration adjust for different ink manufacturers? How about for different scanning techniques? Does it allow for dot gain? Can it demonstrate the difference between results on a sheet-fed printer versus one that's roll-fed?

It's easy to ener a few printing profiles and say "I have my monitor calibrated for print!". It's quite another when you get down into the specifics of just what kind of print, and sorry, but I havent seen any calibration software that can dance as much as that. And before you dismiss these kinds of production questions as silly nattering, remember that, in good print design, the choice of paper stock is just as important as what you're putting on it.

You can profile the actual paper you are using (pain in the butt sometimes but necessary).  First you calibrate the screen, then you calibrate your scanner to the same profile then you scan the paper you are going to use and create a profile for that.  Pro 'togs and photo labs do this all the time.

[Edit]
Look up ICC profiles - should give you loads of info

I've worked with those, Frank, and, like everything else, they come reasonably close, but they arent exact either -- ana s you point out, they're sometimes very tedious to work with, especially if you're working with paper stock that has texturing built into it. They're approximations of the paper colour only, with guess work as to the actual material used to make the paper, which is yet another factor that determines how the ink will lay on the surface.

All of these things are great strides forward from when I started in this industry in the early 80s, no doubt about it. But let's not pretend that we're 100% of the way there. We're not. It's like computer-based type -- folks love to talk about how it's so much better than metal-based settings... and yes, it is. But technology has made us sloppy about typesetting: we believe the computer will do all the kerning and letterspacing for us, when in fact it doesnt, not that much anyway. It still leaves ugly gaps that you have to manually correct, if you're so inclined... which most people arent. So we lose a little bit of type artistry in the process of making things technologically easier -- and no one really misses it, because only folks who really look at type will see the differences.

Well, same with monitor calibration and making it look exactly like what you see on the screen. It's a close match, but it loses out in all the little details that influence things during the actual printing process. But because those are, for the most part, unimportant in most people's eyes, we're willing to give it a bye and say, "Hey, it matches!"... even when it doesnt -- not if you're being completely critical about it.

The pro lab I use seem to manage ok.  They have a set of profiles which they use for the paper stock they print on which you can get hold of (All their prints are digital these days.)  Some of their clients are very picky about the output.  (I don't worry so long as it looks good but I'm not in the advertising industry so it's not so important to me)

What works the best for me is to get used to the difference the way something looks on myu screen, vs how it's going to print, and make little visual adjustments in my head. After some practice I know that the 'off' look on screen is going to give me the print I like - on my photo printer at home. I save this print-adjusted photo as a layer in photoshop.

When dealing with a professional printer, it's near impossible to know how the color on their printers are calibrated. The best thing to do is to send them your unadjusted file and a printout of how you want things to look (proof), and since they are familiar with their printers, they will do the adjustment for you. I haven't run into a professional print shop that is not willing to do this. Also, when I give them the proof, I put it on the type of paper I want too. At least approximate it as close as I can.

My home photo printers are 6 color printers. You get a wider range of tones, and the ability to have more accurate tones with 6 color combinations. Black is not as much of the issue actually, since even four color printers have K (BLACK) cartridge to create nicely saturated black.  The biggest problem with four color ink jet printers was getting acceptable skin tones in photograph printing. Most four color printers were not able to approximate skin color without making it look gray and ashen. (People having near death skin tones in photos).
With six color printers you can get much more realistic skin tones.

Now, skin tones are only the most noticable ones. There are many other tones that are approximated in much better way with six or eight ink ink-jet printers.

There are couple other printing related threads that I seem to remember... Here are links in case there is any useful info in there:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3073556&ebot_calc_page#message_3073556

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3113951&ebot_calc_page#message_3113951