Gamma

[Justinr]

I'll have to put my hand up here and confess to not really understanding what gamma is all about.

Particularly I'd like to get my head around it's effects on skin tones as on a recent print I could only get anywhere close to a decent result was by setting gamma to 1.8 instead of 2.2 on my Epson 2880. Unfortunately it washed out the rest of the image a little, but that was a compromise I accepted for not having red skin where it should be tanned.

[bill t.]

Here's a pretty good overview of gamma...

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/gamma-correction.htm

The middle slider in Photoshop's Levels control adjusts gamma, although it does not display standard units.  Bring a grayscale image from the net into PS and notice how is crushes the tones on one side of the gray scale, as is stretches them out on the other.  The crushed side gets lower contrast, the stretched side gets higher contrast.

Sounds like your are having color management problems.  First thing to check is the brightness of you monitor versus the brightness of your print viewing locations.

Search "my prints are too dark" (with the quotes) on this forum.

[Czornyj]

Viewing conditions can change the perception of TRC ("gamma"):
http://rit-mcsl.org/fairchild/PDFs/AppearanceLec.pdf

[Justinr]

Here's a pretty good overview of gamma...

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/gamma-correction.htm

The middle slider in Photoshop's Levels control adjusts gamma, although it does not display standard units.  Bring a grayscale image from the net into PS and notice how is crushes the tones on one side of the gray scale, as is stretches them out on the other.  The crushed side gets lower contrast, the stretched side gets higher contrast.

Sounds like your are having color management problems.  First thing to check is the brightness of you monitor versus the brightness of your print viewing locations.

Search "my prints are too dark" (with the quotes) on this forum.

Thanks for the link Bill and I think you are right, it's a colour management problem. TBH most of the stuff I print nowadays (as opposed to just send off to mags or websites) is at events so a 'reasonable' print is good enough because that's the name of the game. But now that I've been asked to do some for competitions I've got to up my game, although I have no difficulty getting a good print that doesn't include skin.

Time to work through the system and do a bit of updating of hardware, software and the firmware between the ears!