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.
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.