Help! My photography prints don't look like what I see in Photoshop
Alaina recently asked for help with a technical challenge that has hurt her confidence to go pro:
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When I edit in Photoshop CC, I save my RAW images as JPEG. When I went to print images from a print shop, the color looked terrible... I have been having to convert every photo’s profile from Pro Photo to SRGB before saving it, and every edit I make to the photo after saving it, I have to do the conversion all over again. It’s affecting my confidence moving forward into a business. I've asked many people about this, and found no one who knows what I’m talking about.
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Ahh, color calibration - one of the more technical and frustrating of challenges we professional photographers face, as we try to get the prints we deliver to our clients to look like what we showed them on the laptop or tablet.
Early in my career, I shot sports photos for the Bandera Bulletin newspaper. The school colors were blue and white, but what looked right on my monitor came out orange and just nasty in print. It took me YEARS to upgrade my monitor and get it calibrated so that what I saw on my screen was close to what came out of my printer.
This can get complicated.
But let’s keep it simple, by working backwards from the end.
There are three ‘filters’ that can affect how your images look on the screen versus in print or on other devices:
- Your Printer’s color profile.
- Your monitor, video card, and computer’s color profiles.
- Your monitor’s calibration.
Do your prints come out looking like the images on your monitor?
Do your images on other devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones) look the same as the images on your monitor?
If the answer is NO to both these questions, it’s a safe bet the problem is either:
- Your monitor isn’t color calibrated, and what you see visually are not the ‘true colors’ you’re working with when editing. What you see is not what you’re going to get; or
- Your color profile settings have been changed to some obscure setup that looks good on your monitor, but not to anyone else who isn’t viewing the images in that same color space.
If your images look good on your monitor and on other devices, but your prints aren’t coming out right, the problem may be that your Printer needs you to export your files into their custom color profile.
To fix that problem:
- Go to your Printer’s web site and seek out their custom color profile. If you can’t find one, ask them for it. If they don’t have one, they’re probably not a very good printer. Tell them the problem you’re having: your images look consistent across digital devices, but the prints are coming out [warm, cool, color-shifted, etc.].
- If they do offer a color profile, download and install it into Photoshop per their instructions. Export some test photos using the new profile, and send them off for test prints. When you get them back, see if this fixed the problem. Consider grabbing a color chart online and having this printed as well - if the chart comes back perfect but your photos don’t, the problem may still lie on your end. If the chart and prints both come back off-color, send this info to your printer and ask for their guidance.
If your images only look right on your monitor and nowhere else - not in print, not on other digital devices - your monitor is probably not showing you true colors.
If your monitor, video card, and/or Photoshop are set to a color space other than good old SRGB, change it back. I know... I know what you read about Adobe RGB and Pro Photo and other fancy color spaces...gamuts and raw data and such. Let it go. If your prints look like dookie, none of that other stuff matters.
Reset everything back to SRGB? Very good. Process some test photos (and a color chart), look at them on other devices, and see if you’re getting consistent results.
[Due to the prevalence of Apple products among consumers, you may as well use someone’s iPhone or iPad as your standard against which to measure your calibration results. If your photos don’t look right on those devices, they won’t look right on most devices used by your potential clients.]
Still look wrong?
Odds are good your monitor isn’t calibrated - it isn’t showing true colors. Monitors can display warm or cool, color shifted, too bright, too dark, highlights too light or dark, shadows too light or dark, compared to ‘true.’]
If this is the case, you’ve got three options:
- Expensive: Buy a new monitor well-reviewed for its trueness of color.
- Less Expensive: Buy a monitor color calibration tool like a Spyder, with the caveat that if your monitor is too old or worn out or cheap to display true colors, no tool can fix that (although it may get you closer to true).
- Cheap: Eyeball it. Manually adjust your monitor settings (color temperature, brightness, contrast) until what you’re seeing on other devices is what you see on your monitor. Edit and export some test images and see if you’re getting closer to true. Repeat until you’re as close as you can get without a calibration tool.
What’s your favorite process to get consistent results across print and digital mediums? Share in the comments below, or drop me an e-mail at james@banderaoutlaw.com.
