I'm planning to run a bunch of prints soon, so I thought I'd do the color calibration game first, to make sure that the prints come out the same way they went in.

I bought myself a Gretag MacBeth Eye-One Display, a $250 gizmo that's supposed to measure my screen and produce an ICC profile. I ran everything, plugged the profile into Windows XP, and as far as I can tell with Photoshop 6.0, absolutely nothing whatsoever has changed. I've looked at pictures (in the sRGB profile) before and afterward, using Adobe Photoshop 6.0 which is supposed to know what it's doing. Honestly, I don't see any difference at all.

Anybody else tried this? I just ordered some books on the topic from Amazon in case I might be missing something, but I suspect that my spiffy LCD monitor might have been designed well enough that not much actually needed to be changed.

Did the Gretag device create a new profile in Photoshop?
Go to edit>color settings. (Shift+Ctrl+K)
Click on "Load" and see if the new color profile is in there.

The color calibration is to match what you see on the monitor screen to that of the printed image. So if your print's color matches the color on the image that is on your monitor then your calibrated.

Photoshop 6 isn't fully colour profile aware -- it has it, but it's not all as integrated as in photoshop 7.

-ml

I've set my profile under Control Panels -> Display -> Settings -> Advanced -> Color Management. I noticed another place I could potentially put it in the nVidia properties tab that's next to the Color Management tab, but I left that blank. In Photoshop, under Color settings, the profile does appear on the RGB Working Spaces menu, but the advice I've seen in various places, including the documentation for my display profiler, is to leave that as Adobe RGB.

I haven't done any printing yet, so to some extent I'm flying blind right now. I've ordered a copy of Photoshop CS to upgrade myself from Photoshop 6. Should I wait for that before I do all my color correction to get everything "just so"? My goal is to tweak a large batch of photos so they look correct on my screen, allowing me to then export them to the web (and, I assume, to the sRGB color space) and to a commercial printer. My goal is to make sure everybody sees the images "properly", no matter what.

I've got the Eye-One and it definitely worked (W2k & Photoshop 7, CS & Elements) and was readily aparent to me after it was run that things were different - the slight bluish cast on my Syncmaster 171B was gone. I found the 'moron mode' was what I needed to work with. I tried the CRT setup on my LCD and it couldn't get the colors it wanted (well I had to try, I'm a geek).

I don't think there's more to it than running idiot mode, telling it CRT or LCD and then letting it run the test & autosave the profile. Perhaps your monitor was perfect to begin with (not likely)? My change was definitely subtle (but noticable if one was watching it change).

If I come up with something brilliant I'll let you know. I'm getting a new XP system at the office in about a week and I'll be running it on that.

Mind you the Eye-One is only a monitor calibration system. Their printer calibration system is a bit more expensive (around $700 IIRC).

-Zeke

Mind you the Eye-One is only a monitor calibration system. Their printer calibration system is a bit more expensive (around $700 IIRC).

I'm assuming, and maybe it's false, that if I'm looking at something on a calibrated monitor and send it to a professional printer, that I'll get out what I put in, so long as I'm not asking for colors outside of the printer's gamut. (And, maybe the professional printer service could give me ICC profiles for their printers so I could check for gamut issues before I ship them the bits.)

(And, maybe the professional printer service could give me ICC profiles for their printers so I could check for gamut issues before I ship them the bits.)

I would also recommend that you send them a scaled-down sample image for them to print, as well, so that you can see exactly what you're going to get. If whatever you're printing is worth sending to the professional printer to begin with, this little bit extra isn't something to skimp on.

The usual practice is to send them a colour target image, from the calibration software itself.

Cheers

Hmm... I don't see any way to generate such a target image from my Gretag Macbeth software. I suppose I could build one using official Pantone colors... Do you have a target image sample that I could look at?

The usual image is the industry standard Gretag Macbeth Color Checker chart.. do they not include one with the software ???

Cheers

Nope, no color chart anywhere in the software.

Ah, is that how it's done? I've not had to deal with all this colour calibration/printing stuff yet, since everything I've done to date has still been film.

I've been investingating this further, and I've got some interesting things to report. Apparently, you can get remarkably good prints at, of all places, Wal-Mart and Costco. It seems these places are buying Fuji Frontier or Noritsu printers that print onto standard color photographic paper. Many of the Fuji vendors are printing on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which is supposedly one of the better papers out there. Plus, these machines are self-calibrating, such that they can be operated by idiots.

Well, for $0.20/piece, you can get 4x6's, up to $2.00/piece for 8x10's. That's an order of magnitude cheaper than other professional printing options.

Better yet, it seems that many of these places have had their specific machines profiled. You can go to Dry Creek Photo and check out all their data. Some of the vendors have some sort of "enhanced" profile, as well. I dunno what that means, but the instructions are illuminating reading. They recommend that you explicitly convert your images to match the printer profiles, then save the images without an embedded profile, lest you confuse the printer. Instead, you beg and plead with the printer operator to run your prints with the built-in correction software disabled.

Wild, huh?