Part of Birthday Month is presents. I got one today!
Last week, as I was wrestling with my cousin's wedding pictures and bemoaning the fact that the color on the monitor was not the same as the color on the printer or even the color on the other monitor, I recalled that they make calibrators for just this sort of problem. "Oz, for my birthday, I want … "
Now my PC monitor is all calibrated and on screen, my photographs look very nicely colored. My relatives and I are not quite so flushed as we were looking before calibration. (No alcohol at the wedding, so we were not flushed in reality either.)
I then tried to color calibrate my photo printer, which does a great job except that photos print darker than they appear on screen (no way around that, I guess, seeing as how prints aren't backlit) and the reds tend to pop more so my relatives and I look flushed in the prints. I ran through the calibration procedure and all seemed well. Then I printed a shot of my aunt. Red auntie! Back to the factory defaults. I tried adjusting the color space setting on the printer. Less red auntie! That'll do for now. These test prints are sucking up all my ink.
Eh. I'd like to be able to do my color correction on the monitor and have the image print with those colors. I'm not quite there yet. Since I mostly enjoy my photographs in electronic form, having the monitor calibrated is more important. But when I drop a print of my cousin and his bride into the CD mailer, I don't want them looking all red. (I inflicted CDs of photos on everyone, which they are unlikely to look at, hence a nice print to stick on the fridge.)
306 words | June 13, 2007 11:58 PM | ShutterbugNot having a photo printer, I haven't run across this problem yet. I've actually had good luck with giving people CDs, though I mostly just give them to people who are really likely to look at them: A couple of my pictures ended up in the online collection of a wedding we went to, for example.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at June 14, 2007 01:32 AMWell, I was mostly exaggerating about the CDs not getting looked at. The bride and groom will definitely look at their wedding pictures (and since I gave them the full-sized files, they may get more use out of my images than what they get from the professional photographer, though I skipped shooting a lot of the posed shots). There are photos of interest (kids! grandkids! graduation cake!) to all people who received the CDs.
I didn't have a photoprinter for a long time, but I'm finding that it's nice to have one. I throw prints in with notes and cards and give prints to neighborhood people if I take their picture. It's also nice to be able to see images at a higher resolution than what my monitor can offer.
Posted by: 100 word minimum at June 14, 2007 08:07 AM