Prints too dark and loss of saturation - need help
Hi all,
I know you must have heard "my prints are too dark" very often - at least those of you who print at home. But I am facing here a situation I do not understand, and maybe some of you will be able to help me out.
I print on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk paper, using an Epson R2880. My Monitor is a NEC PA241W, calibrated using an i1 Display Pro. Truth be told, my monitor is certainly a tad too bright - but I am aware of it and do not expect my prints to be that bright.
In C1P, before printing I do some soft proofing with the ICC profile downloaded from the Ilford website to see how much I can push in terms of brightness. Once ready, I print. In C1P print box I ensure that the right color profile is selected (Ilford's one), put the rendering intent to "Perceptual" with Black Point Compensation. Then I click on print, which opens up the system's print window (I am on a Mac). I make sure that the color settings is set to "Off" and that the media type is "Epson Premium Glossy" (as instructed by Ilford). Finally I get my printer running and look at the result... which is really not looking good: much darker than on my screen and a rather large loss of color saturation.
I was very surprised as I used in the past to print through Capture NX 2 going through the *exact* same steps, and every time I got exactly what I wanted, with the right amount of brightness and color saturation. Since I did not use CNX2 for a while, I decided to do a test with the exact same photo, doing some adjustments to bring it to a level close to what I had in C1P. Then I printed from CNX2 and ... I got exactly what I had on the screen.
Does anyone has any idea of what I am doing wrong ? I love printing my photos and this is really becoming a headache. It is really as if C1P was either not using the color profile at all, ignoring it, or ... I don't know ☹️
Thanks for your help !
I know you must have heard "my prints are too dark" very often - at least those of you who print at home. But I am facing here a situation I do not understand, and maybe some of you will be able to help me out.
I print on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk paper, using an Epson R2880. My Monitor is a NEC PA241W, calibrated using an i1 Display Pro. Truth be told, my monitor is certainly a tad too bright - but I am aware of it and do not expect my prints to be that bright.
In C1P, before printing I do some soft proofing with the ICC profile downloaded from the Ilford website to see how much I can push in terms of brightness. Once ready, I print. In C1P print box I ensure that the right color profile is selected (Ilford's one), put the rendering intent to "Perceptual" with Black Point Compensation. Then I click on print, which opens up the system's print window (I am on a Mac). I make sure that the color settings is set to "Off" and that the media type is "Epson Premium Glossy" (as instructed by Ilford). Finally I get my printer running and look at the result... which is really not looking good: much darker than on my screen and a rather large loss of color saturation.
I was very surprised as I used in the past to print through Capture NX 2 going through the *exact* same steps, and every time I got exactly what I wanted, with the right amount of brightness and color saturation. Since I did not use CNX2 for a while, I decided to do a test with the exact same photo, doing some adjustments to bring it to a level close to what I had in C1P. Then I printed from CNX2 and ... I got exactly what I had on the screen.
Does anyone has any idea of what I am doing wrong ? I love printing my photos and this is really becoming a headache. It is really as if C1P was either not using the color profile at all, ignoring it, or ... I don't know ☹️
Thanks for your help !
0
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[quote="jacques" wrote:
@Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Please do not take offense, but I believe you should start a new thread entirely if you want to receive specific opinions about RIP softwares. It will certainly avoid confusion 😊
no worries, I think you are right, I shouldn't have jumped into your thread, however I considered to be related as they were already recommending you to use a RIP.
Cheers,
Daniel0 -
Hi, [quote="NN634892121077937682UL" wrote:
Hi Jacques,
I ran a diff command on CO .ps and CNX .ps and there are some differences. I am not a post script expert so not sure exactly what they do .. some seem to related to whitepoint and colorspace.
Keep in mind, this post script analysis is only a possible reference point to see whats going on behind the scenes when CO and CNX is printing. Normal image printing, as far as I know, does not use post script.
Heres a dump of differences. The lines beginning with < means the value was in the CO with profile .ps file.
The lines with > are whats different in the CNX .ps file
Thanks for pointing out those differences. Maybe it will also help PhaseOne in understanding what is going on... ?[quote="NN634892121077937682UL" wrote:
At this point I am not sure where to proceed. CNX could be boosting for printing and you cant really compare the prints and you may have to come up with a new print prep workflow without the boost.
If you want, if you post the tiff I can print here and see how it matches my screen. I am calibrated at 83cd.
Here is the TIF:
It is really kind of you to go so far as to print it yourself! But maybe even before doing so, can you check how it looks on the screen vs what I have posted:
The top most print is the closest to what I would like to achieve (TIF from COP8, printed form CNX2), while the bottom one is what I get directly from COP8.0 -
[quote="dasle" wrote:
no worries, I think you are right, I shouldn't have jumped into your thread, however I considered to be related as they were already recommending you to use a RIP.
Hi Daniel,
Happy it did not offend you. Note though that I am really interested in your question and the answers from other people having experience with RIP softwares - a specific thread would make much sense. Maybe posting your question in PhaseOne's common forum or in Luminous Landscape's specific forum could help ?0 -
Hi Jaques,
I loaded the TIFF into CO8 and compared my CO print pdf preview to your COP8.pdf. Accounting for changes in sharpening and print profile (I use epson premium luster), I would say they are pretty much the same. Mine may be a little brighter but sharpening can bring that out ( like in the foreground grass area with highlights. ) Your colors may be a tad more muted, but, once again I attribute this to differences in sharpening and profile. I switched to sharpening of 25 like in your post and mine is still a little sharper and the grass highlights are still a bit more evident. I would say accounting for different profiles, both pdfs are very much the same. So I would say both of our systems are creating very similar pre-prints and can rule out any differences there.
I printed the tiff and under strong light it pretty much matches my screen.
Viewed in ambient light it darkens considerably as expected. Have you viewed both your CNX and CO prints in full outside daylight.
The roof top red and clay match up. The light greens may be a little less vibrant in the print. The highlights in the foreground grass match up as do the highlighted trees on right. The highlighted tree trunks on right match up pretty well. The transitions to shadows also match up pretty well.
Not accounting for viewing light, I would say my print more closely matches the Co8 print in your comparison jpg.
Taking into account the differences in transmissive LCD viewing and reflective print/ink and color differences, I would say my on-screen CO8 view more closely matches your CNX print in the comparison jpg in brightness only. To my eyes, the CNX print has a bit of an HDR effect with the boosted reds and greens, though.
The CNX print is probably more room ambient lighting friendly (maybe thats why they boost it) and the CO print will need to be adjusted for different viewing conditions.
I know you run your monitor at 150, but maybe you could print prep at night with a difference calibration and brightness. You can clone variants of the original processed image and mess with it. You might have more success in print matching your screen in CO environment without the CNX print boost and achieve the look you are going for.
Let me know how the prints looks in bright daylight conditions.0 -
[quote="jacques" wrote:
Hi,[quote="NN634892121077937682UL" wrote:
I have to conclude that this is something in the print engine (every print engine has a little different rendering ) and I hit on a situation that is being magnified.
I would like to have c1 be part of my print workflow but I may just settle on using the RIP software and figure out its print sharpening.
I have created recipes that create the tiff and drop them in the RIP queue so thats pretty cool.
Good luck and I will continue to evaluate the print engine with other images.
Thanks for trying on your side. It might be that we have a different issue indeed. On my side the difference is very noticeable, and what bugs me the most is that whether I set an ICC profile or not, COP8 will give me the exact same print.
I am still discussing with PhaseOne support (kudos to them, they are following up very quickly!) and hopefully we will soon find out the what the problem is. I was requested to take a photo of the two prints side-by-side (the one which I get from COP8, and the one I get from CNX2), so I will also put it there in the forum. Excuse the low quality and weird white balance, I took it with an iPhone. But you can very easily spot the differences (check the colors overall, especially in the center of the image, and then the brightness in the grass at the bottom and the trees on the right). The top print comes from Capture NX2 (RAW adjusted in COP8, exported as a TIF, loaded into Capture NX2 and printed from there with Ilford Gold Fibre Silk ICC profile), the bottom one comes from COP8 (and again: whether I select the ICC profile or not, the print comes out *exactly* the same).
(I do not embed the image directly as it gets cropped automatically).
@Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Please do not take offense, but I believe you should start a new thread entirely if you want to receive specific opinions about RIP softwares. It will certainly avoid confusion 😊
Hello Jaques,
Was this ever resolved? There seems to be a problem with CO1 not being able to control Epson printer drivers correctly on Mac os. I get desaturated darkish prints in a fully calibrated environment.
Chris0 -
[quote="ChrisM" wrote:
Hello Jaques,
Was this ever resolved? There seems to be a problem with CO1 not being able to control Epson printer drivers correctly on Mac os. I get desaturated darkish prints in a fully calibrated environment.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Since the last reply to this thread was posted, I had unfortunately no time to follow-up due to my work - which means I did not test any new print since then. This is a shame, given the excellent support I was getting from this forum. As soon as I get more time to spend on this, I will continue my investigations.
To answer your question, no this issue was never solved. I also opened a case with PhaseOne's support (#158897) but it did not reach a positive conclusion. I did not try to print yet with the latest version of CO (8.2.1); but even in their release documentation I do not see anything related to printing. I read your new thread and it looks like we are having the same problem, so maybe there is a trend (calibrated environment, dark and de-saturated prints).
I think the best is to continue asking both in this forum and also open a case with the support. The more input support gets, the easier it will be for them to pinpoint the issue. As I said, I will restart my own tests as soon as I can and post the results in my thread. I would appreciate if you do the same so that if this problem ever gets clarified we all benefit from it.
Don't hesitate to ask me questions about my tests or my setup if you think it will help solve the problem. As a recap, I run on Yosemite 10.10.2. I did not do a clean install of Yosemite but an update from Mavericks.
Jacques0
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