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Hi,
my final aim is to look at my prints and say: "it's the same thing i saw with my own eyes".

I have read about spiders, color profiles (icc) and others...but i still haven't found someone able to explain me how to fulfil the entire process (acquire, manage, print)of colours calibration.

Can you help me ?

Ale

Asked by Alessandro Lavagna: my final aim is to look at my prints and say: "it's the same thing i saw with my own eyes".

When it comes to colors, don't trust your memory. You can't beat biology.

You can't beat physics and chemistry either.
The range of colors you can capture on film or chip or get from a printer doesn't even come close to the number of colors you can see.

You can reduce the difference between real and printed colors, but you'll never ever get a print that shows 'the same thing I saw with my own eyes.'

To get a little closer to your goal:
Make print. Compare print with original subject under exactly the same lighting conditions. Adjust color settings, make new print, compare print to...

Colors on prints look different than on your screen, even if you load a color profile, so you'll have to take the road of trial and error.

nooo i can't believe you.
There must be ICC profiles for my monitor and my printer !

I have no time (and money) to waste.

Thanks for your supporting answer.

;-)
Ale

Time and money spent on experiments is never wasted, no matter what the outcome may be.

Have fun struggling with the color profiles ; )

The first step is to make sure you understand color and light, so that when you snap the shutter, the camera is recording the colors of the scene "accurately" (so that what looks white to your eyes looks white in the result). This is a matter of using the white balance in your digital camera to match the light, and understanding everything related to that. Just that step alone will help a great deal.

The next step is to make sure you have a high quality monitor to view the photo on. This means that it displays a full range of brightness, with clean accurate color. I'm fond of the sony trinitron monitors (standard here, not lcd) because they're bright, clear, and appear accurate to my eyes. A monitor spider would tell you how good your monitor is or how it changes over time (they do wear out). I haven't used one yet.

The next step is to understand the color profile that comes in the image from the digital camera (mine, for instance, uses Nikon sRGB) and the color profile of you photo program (Photoshop likes to work in plain sRGB the way I have it set up, although it keeps the Nikon profile unless I tell it otherwise.) All this is just telling your computer how to interpret the color data in the file.

After that is the step I haven't explored fully yet - getting a profile for your printer or (for instance) the Fuji Frontier, and properly converting the image to that so it will print as close as possible to how it looked on screen. I'm not experienced with that part yet, and am in the processing of learning it. However, I have found that some photo services (such as photojo.com) seem to handle this step just fine automatically (not all do), so that the printed image looks just like on screen and just like I remember it. I suspect they may be doing the printing profile conversion automatically for me. Their colors are excellent in accuracy.

I'm still working on how to do the conversion myself so when I send the pics off for printing on a Frontier machine, they come out right. I think I understand it, but I need to send off for some more test prints to check it.

Oh, also - if you are printing using an inkjet printer, you pretty much have to stay brand-loyal to get proper color balance. Epson paper with Epson ink; Kodak paper with Kodak ink; etc. Otherwise the chemical interactions cause weirdness in the color that results, and it's hard to get right.

Also if you have a lab do prints for you, ask them for thier ICC profile of thier printing system so you can be sure the colours match. One service I use has an ICC profile you can download which lets you match your colours to thier equipment which makes for less headaches later on.

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