Today I take you through a full monitor and printer calibration with the X-Rite ColorMunki Photo, and we also take a look at how to optimize a printer profile.
Although it was a little late, I finally published an iPod optimized version of the video via the iTunes/RRS stream, so recheck iTunes if that’s where you usually get your MBP fix.
The full-sized video will only be available here, or on Vimeo, to download the video for offline viewing.
By the way, if you live in Japan, in or close to Tokyo, it would be great to see you in Gotanda for my Color Managed Digital Workflow seminar, at X-Rite Japan. See my Workshops Web site for details.
The Martin Bailey Photography Podcast is sponsored by WebSpy, the Internet monitoring, analysis and reporting specialists. For details of WebSpy products and a 10% discount, visit our landing page at http://www.webspy.com/mbp.
Thank you a lot, Martin. Walking through the process and discussing the problems were helpful, indeed.
Thorough and clear walk through !! Especially the discussion of your printing struggle with the lush green waterfall shot – I feel your pain ;P
Hi again
About the lush green waterfall photo for which the printer profile was causing trouble…
Cropping the area with the problematic greens and trying to optimize the profile for that area alone may be helpful…
Another option:
Read the RGB values of that area and mask-edit the area slightly until it returns to the gamut.
What do you think?
That’s good to hear. Thanks for leaving the comment Karo!
Martin.
Woops, for some reason the last two comments weren’t there when I wrote my last post.
Thanks Marcus. It sure can be a problem.
Karo,
I might be wrong, but I don’t think cropping the image would work. As you might have seen in the video, there were a number of cells on the optimization print out that were not used, which makes me think that it has all the samples it needs.
I’ve spend a lot of time in the past changing areas of prints to bring them back into gamut, and I personally have never been successful. The area I change always ends up looking like a septic scab or something. I do find it much easier to print these sort of greens on some gloss or satin papers though, which would be my choice of action when trying to overcoming this sort of problem.
Cheers,
Martin.
Frankly, I hadn’t noticed the blank cells. That surely would answers my question 🙂
However, I’m not sure if the printer can be blamed for not delivering those subtle greens on that paper… I would rather formulate it as ink/paper incompatibility.
Anyway, it’s still a shame to confront such issues after being this fastidious and striving for quality, especially during the final coronation act of holding the print…
Great photos, BTW!
Yes, well that is part of my point. The printer is capable of recreating these colors, but not on that paper. As I said, if I change the paper, I can create a print with these greens that I’m happy with.
This is the reason I changed to Harman GLOSS paper for the Colors of Japan Folio here:
http://mbpfolios.com/The_Colours_of_Japan_Folio.html
Conversely, the top wild flower photo in my Flowerscapes folio, which also has lots of greens, could not be printed on the Harman GLOSS. I used the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag for the Flowerscapes folio to get a good representation of this photo. Also, the reds in some other photos were not so nice on the GLOSS paper.
http://mbpfolios.com/Flowerscapes_Folio.html
It really comes down to the idea that every photo has its perfect paper. In producing my folios the most challenging aspect is matching a full set of 10 or 12 images to one paper type. In addition to changing paper, I even had to drop some photos in favor of others, just because I couldn’t get them to work on a particular paper. This happened on one set after I’d successfully soft-proofed and printed the majority of the other images. That hurt! 🙂
And thanks for the kind words about the photos! 🙂
Cheers,
Martin.