Print Quality – Photos Too Dark? Try This.

This installment on Photo Print Quality – “My Prints Are Too Dark” was written by Drew Hendrix of Red River Paper.  Installment 1 was on calibrating laptops and matte photo paper.  Installment 2 addressed the Adobe RGB and sRGB workspaces.  This installment ends with a contest that 10 people will win! Read through to the end of this post for details.

“My Prints Are Too Dark”

Print quality is a tricky beast.  If your photo prints are consistently darker that what you see on your monitor, there is a good chance that your monitor brightness is too high. LCD displays are designed to display movies and the internet in a bright and bold fashion. Unfortunately this does not mean that they display the colors, shades, and tones of your photography correctly without some adjustment.

So why is monitor brightness such a big deal? When you are editing photos on a bright monitor, you are not making adjustments relative to the actual image file. If you adjust for exposure on a bright monitor you’ll likely still have an underexposed file and dark prints.

So how do you fix the problem? There are two three answers you can explore:

1) Simply turn down your monitor’s brightness. We’ve found that many monitors will be under 10 on scale of 100 brightness before they get close to accurate. For example, my Dell 2407 monitor is at zero brightness and is still slightly too bright.

So pick an image that recently printed too dark. Lower the brightness of your monitor to around 10%. Open the image and re-edit for exposure. You will probably find the next print to be much closer to your monitor.

2) Purchase a monitor calibration device. It will allow your monitor to properly display the colors of your photography. The calibration process also entails adjustments to brightness and contrast. If you currently own or decide to buy a calibration system run it in advanced mode! You will get a better profile and better results. Please note a monitor profile is NOT a printer profile. Do not plug it into any part of the Photoshop or printing workflow.

Below are the three big players in the monitor calibration market. There is a wide range of models to consider. Red River Paper has experience with each of these products, and we chose the Eye-One system for use at our offices.

3) Erin’s Note:  Make sure to update your ICC profiles when you use a new printer.  I recently bought an Epson Artisan 800 (love it!), but couldn’t figure out why my prints were so dark until I updated my ICC profiles from Red River.  I forgot that ICC profiles are both printer and paper specific.  For some reason I was thinking that ICC profiles only needed to be changed when you changed paper.

OK, are you ready for the contest? Red River Paper is giving 2 boxes of greeting card stock to each of 10 Texas Chick readers.  Each winner will receive 2 boxes of Red River’s pre-scored inkjet printable greeting card stock – one Polar Matte and one River Linen in the 7″ x 10″ size that folds to 5″ x 7″.

Remember, Mother’s Day is just around the corner.  We easily spend over $50 in cards on Mother’s Day in this family, between moms, grandmothers’, steps, in -laws, etc.  Making Mother’s Day cards would be much more economical!

To enter, read about the Polar Matte and River Linen greeting card stock at Red River and post a comment saying which you would normally order.  Post two additional comments each time you click on one of the Share and Enjoy buttons below to share via Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, etc.  The drawing will be held Tuesday, March 9 and entries will be accepted through  noon CST of that day.

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