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Prints too dark but monitor calibrated

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Thenolands:
I am doing some amateur art reproduction work but my prints are coming out too dark. Before 1000 people post telling me my monitor is too bright let me explain my setup. Shooting with Pentax 645z, printing on ipf8400, screen calibrated with Spyder 5, exposed the image according to in-camera light meter using gray card in same light as artwork, using custom color profile created using colorchecker passport. I feel like my monitor and print match pretty well but my issue is why is it too dark if I am not editing the photo and it is supposedly a properly exposed image? Again, I am not viewing on a bright screen and reducing the exposure in post. I am not adjusting exposure at all. It doesn't seem like I should have to increase my exposure in post production just to get a proper image printed.

BobShaw:
Could be lots of things.
First is it correctly exposed? If you don't know if it correctly exposed then you are on the back foot. What does the histogram show? Is the histogram for the grey card image in the centre of the histogram? Did you adjust levels or something similar? As you move the mouse over the image do the highlights read about 220+ on the Digital Color Meter or in the application?
At the end of the day, if the subject is dark, the print will be dark.

Also there is no such thing as "amateur art reproduction". There may be reproduction of amateur art, but Art Reproduction is a complex thing.

Dave Rosser:

--- Quote from: Thenolands on September 06, 2017, 01:07:42 am ---I am doing some amateur art reproduction work but my prints are coming out too dark. Before 1000 people post telling me my monitor is too bright let me explain my setup. Shooting with Pentax 645z, printing on ipf8400, screen calibrated with Spyder 5, exposed the image according to in-camera light meter using gray card in same light as artwork, using custom color profile created using colorchecker passport. I feel like my monitor and print match pretty well but my issue is why is it too dark if I am not editing the photo and it is supposedly a properly exposed image? Again, I am not viewing on a bright screen and reducing the exposure in post. I am not adjusting exposure at all. It doesn't seem like I should have to increase my exposure in post production just to get a proper image printed.

--- End quote ---
I find Canon Printers print dark at default settings. You can adjust print brightness in the printer driver,  I find I have to apply 20 brightness adjustment to my Canon Pro 100 to get a satisfactory print brightness even though I have a fully colour managed workflow. If you are using Lightroom you can adjust the brightness in the Lightroom print module rather than the printer driver.

nirpat89:

--- Quote from: Thenolands on September 06, 2017, 01:07:42 am ---
I am doing some amateur art reproduction work but my prints are coming out too dark. Before 1000 people post telling me my monitor is too bright let me explain my setup. Shooting with Pentax 645z, printing on ipf8400, screen calibrated with Spyder 5, exposed the image according to in-camera light meter using gray card in same light as artwork, using custom color profile created using colorchecker passport. I feel like my monitor and print match pretty well but my issue is why is it too dark if I am not editing the photo and it is supposedly a properly exposed image? Again, I am not viewing on a bright screen and reducing the exposure in post. I am not adjusting exposure at all. It doesn't seem like I should have to increase my exposure in post production just to get a proper image printed.

--- End quote ---

Agree with Bob on reproduction photography being a very difficult thing.   A project taking pictures of antique wall papers once made me realize how much.

With the problem at hand, my sense is that the mismatch is something to do with the use of the grey card. The grey card, used conventionally in the way it was used in a film camera, will symmetrically push the exposure within the dynamic scale of the film or the sensor.  The result is that the photograph is "properly" exposed, but it is "correctly" exposed?  I would say it depends on how you light up your subject.  If you do an experiment and vary the amount of light falling on your painting (I am assuming that's what your are reproducing) and take several shots each using the grey card as your exposure guide, the resulting photographs will all look the same.  So even though you made no change in post-processing, only one of those photograph, if that, will match the intensity of the original subject.  So by not doing any editing, you actually end up with an inexact reproduction.  In your particular case, you got darker outcome because the artwork is well-lit, as usually is, and the camera wants to normalize it to 18% grey.  Looking at it another way, if you take a picture of a dark room using grey card, you end up with a light room.

Considering that there is no mismatch between the monitor and the print, you can pretty much use the monitor to do the final adjustment.  Light your painting as it would normally be lighted in display where you can see it side by side with your monitor, preferably with the same color temperature as your monitor calibration.  Then using something like Levels adjustment with the middle grey slider, darken or lighten to match the monitor and the painting to your satisfaction.  Print and hopefully you will be much closer than before.

Does that make sense?

:Niranjan.

Thenolands:
@BobShaw: I get it is complex. That is why I am in the newbie section asking questions. To your other comments, to get a histogram of the gray card I assume I have to take a shot containing only the gray card or can I crop to include only the gray card?

@Niranjan: forgive me but I thought the point of the gray card was to eliminate the fact that the light sensor in camera wants to make everything 18% gray and thus normalize the exposure regardless of how well or dimly lit the subject is. No? If not, are you saying I should back the lights far enough off the art that it is not so intensely lit? I am afraid this would result in poor light coverage of the piece (again, I don't have a $100k setup)

Also, failed to mention that I already have +20 brightness selected in Lightroom just to get print to match monitor. With the painting I am currently working on, I got the print to match just about spot on (to my amateur eye) when I increased the exposure in Lightroom by 1.0. That seems to be ALOT to me. So,one, I don't feel that should be necessary to match the print and two, I worry about artifacts similar to high ISO if I am constantly artificially boosting exposure

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