ICC profile or new printer?

N

Nick Cartwright

Guest
I have an old HP Photosmart P1000 which is ok, but some prints have less than perfect skin tones and colour balance in general. (it is only a 3 colour, plus black, printer).

Can you Profile older printers, or would I be better off buying a new printer? (and would it be advisable to get this profiled?)

Any recomendations for the latter? I would consier an A3 printer if the price wasn't too much higher.
 
I have had a few printer for prining photos out, I am currently on a photo 890.
I have messed around with colour profiles and sometimes I can get it spot on. I have thought about buying a new printer but I use an online photo company now, photobox.co.uk. They are cheap and fast and excellent quality prints, it just doesn't seems worth the hassel of spending £100 and expensive inks and messing around trying to get a good print, I use my printer for normal stuff now and buy the cheapest inks I can.
 
I 2nd that from Jazzmonkey.
IMHO you will never get better prints than those done by the pro's.
Photobox for me everytime- quality is top drawer and always arrive with 48hrs of ordering.

No inkjet will get close to them.

£100.00 spent on a printer will get you 2000 7x5 prints:eek::eek::eek: from PB
 
I am coming round to this idea! I have a printer that is pretty good 90% of the time. I will give Photobox a go with a selection of pics. This will please my wife too, who complains that she never sees the photos we take. i argue that you are more likely to see them on a PC screen than in a shoe box under the bed!

Thanks for the advice, it was so obvious what I should do that I completely missed it!!

Cheers,
 
If you shoot in Adobe RGB make sure it is saved to sRGB or else they will look flat from photobox.
 
Jazz Monkey Jr said:
If you shoot in Adobe RGB make sure it is saved to sRGB or else they will look flat from photobox.

Don't have Photoshop so stick to sRGB from camera thru to end reslt. Using Serif Photoplus 10 at the moment and it is very good. I don't need to spend twice as much on PS elements jsut yet (i don't think!!!).

I feel a trial Photobox run coming on this weekend.

Thnaks again for the advice.

~(excuse typing, has a couple of wines or five!!)
 
Jazz Monkey Jr said:
If you shoot in Adobe RGB make sure it is saved to sRGB or else they will look flat from photobox.

Can you explain why that is?
i shoot in ARGB in RAW and process and save a copy in Jpeg in the same colourspace.
the shots i get back from PB look how I expect but now you've got me worried.
maybe I should re-order a duplicate in sRGB to see any difference.
 
When you use AdobeRGB colourspace you are recording colours outside the gamut of sRGB, therefore recording more colours, and is the choice of professionals, and some printers will also pring AdobeRGB.
When you upload them to photobox they use sRGB for normal prints, so the extra colours outside sRGB don't get printed, so they look flat.
You can use Adobe RGB as long as when you are converting them to JPEG/TIFF you select sRGB as you colourspace.

I had a few back from photobox and when I checked they were adobeRGB, I saved them as JPEG and when I got them back they were much, much better, as they looked on the monitor.

It is important to note that the Fuji Frontier printers currently strip out any embedded profiles in your images, so you should ensure that your images are submitted in sRGB.

See THIS thread.
 
If I was to use Photobox or any other online printer service that uses sRGB, should I set my monitor to sRGB as well as my camera and also use their calibration chart to get the colour/brightness and contrast to match? The reason I ask this is because until recently I didn't have a colour management profile set for my monitor. When I had prints done by Photobox, they were always a bit darker than I expected. I've now set sRGB as my default profile for both my monitor and Paint Shop Pro X and also calibrated my monitor using the Photobox calibration chart. Should I now start to get prints that are a bit more faithful to how I see them on my monitor or is there some other factor that I havent considered?
 
Jazz monkey jr

Thanks for the reply.

My workflow is such that i work totally in CS2. I open all my RAW in bridge.
Sort, delete, tag, rename, metadata, keyword & caption.
Open all into Camera Raw CS2 and apply adjustments etc.
Save all processed RAW to .DNG files so i now have original RAW and .DNG with adjustments.

I then batch process from .DNG into Jpeg or Tiff depending on my need for the shot.
Is it at this point I should convert to sRGB? So my saved JPEGs would be in sRGB

I would usually then open the Jpeg in PS CS2 and sharpen etc and save for Photobox.
Another question: I never change the pixel count in my images but just choose a small file size (size 2) in PS. This means the files I upload to PB are around 5k x 3k pixels at a resolution of 300ppi.
Each file is about 0.5mb

Is this correct?
 
redmax said:
I then batch process from .DNG into Jpeg or Tiff depending on my need for the shot.
Is it at this point I should convert to sRGB? So my saved JPEGs would be in sRGB

Yep, convert to sRGB with you save as JPEG, save at highest JPEG quality at full resolution before uploading them for print, this will ensure the best print quality and should be excellent even at 30" x 20".
 
bowenjones said:
If I was to use Photobox or any other online printer service that uses sRGB, should I set my monitor to sRGB as well as my camera and also use their calibration chart to get the colour/brightness and contrast to match? The reason I ask this is because until recently I didn't have a colour management profile set for my monitor. When I had prints done by Photobox, they were always a bit darker than I expected. I've now set sRGB as my default profile for both my monitor and Paint Shop Pro X and also calibrated my monitor using the Photobox calibration chart. Should I now start to get prints that are a bit more faithful to how I see them on my monitor or is there some other factor that I havent considered?

You can set your camera to any colour space as long as you convert it to sRGB when saving as JPEG (Rawshooter etc)

If you order a calibration print from photobox you want to set to get the best match, your monitor will usually have its own profile from the manufacturers website or you can use adobe gamma, then you shouldn't be far off, you may need to tweak brightness and contrast to get as close as possible to the photobox print.

I am no expert but I hope this helps.
 

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