Screen brightness and printing

[Steve F]

 

Hey guys and girls,

I just had a couple of my paintings printed professionally from high quality photos that I took (tif format), as a test for a larger scale print run. The quality was very good, but both came out quite dark. I'm using a HD screen and it is colour calibrated. But I'm wondering, is the darkness due to the printer settings (for which I have no info), or could it be because I have the screen set too bright when I'm editing photos? I normally set it one level below max. brightness. Has anyone got any thoughts? Does my portfolio look a bit dark for example???

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Johnnie5]

You should probably study up on printer profiles and how to use them first.  The histogram might help you judge what will look good also.  I think there are people here that know much more than I on the subject, hopefully they will reply.  I have used printer profiles to have photos printed at a lab and the results match what I saw on my screen. 

[SFL]

It might be irrelevant to your problem but when I send my files to pro lab, this is what I do. 

 

1. I ask for printer profile from the lab. If they say they don’t have it, or they don’t need it, move on to the next pro lab. 

2. With the printer profile installed, I carry out soft proof, in my case, in CS6. You can also use Lightroom. 

3. When I am happy, I save it as highest quality jpeg and send it to them. No need for tiff. 

4. I ask the pro lab, do not do any adjustments to the image when printing. 

5.  Soft proofing is not exact science as it relies on human eyes. But it is the only way to deal with the conversion from RGB to CMYK. 

 

Hope this is of any help. 

 

Sung

 

Edit: few words added and deleted.

 

Edited March 6, 2019 by SFL

[M.Chapman]

48 minutes ago, Steve F said:

Does my portfolio look a bit dark for example???

 

No to my eyes looking on my monitor it doesn't (although my monitor is set quite bright). There are some shots where the shadows could do with being opened up (for example R34T28 and R3534N) where the lighting was challenging, but other than that they look OK to me.

 

Mark

[Bill Brooks]

1 hour ago, Steve F said:

 

Hey guys and girls,

I just had a couple of my paintings printed professionally from high quality photos that I took (tif format), as a test for a larger scale print run. The quality was very good, but both came out quite dark. I'm using a HD screen and it is colour calibrated. But I'm wondering, is the darkness due to the printer settings (for which I have no info), or could it be because I have the screen set too bright when I'm editing photos? I normally set it one level below max. brightness. Has anyone got any thoughts? Does my portfolio look a bit dark for example???

 

Thanks,

Steve

 

If you are using a colour calibrator puck on your monitor screen, like the spyder, it should also set the whites, blacks, and mid points, (brightness). There would be no need to set the screen for brightness independently of the colour calibration by the puck.

Looking at your images they seem to be OK except I would have more shadow detail. This may just be a matter of my taste. Did the dark prints image contain a lot of shadow detail? Like a night scene?

Once you colour calibrate the monitor never ever change the brightness of the screen.

On the mac under system preferences, Monitor, Display, leave setting alone. Under Color should be the color look up table created by your colour calibration puck. Under Night Shift, settings should be entirely OFF.

The microsoft OS probably has similiar settings.

If you are making prints the print image you send to the printer should have less dynamic range than an image that looks good on your monitor. The blacks should be less black and the whites less white. A piece of paper does not have as great a dynamic range as a monitor. When it comes to prints I am out of my depth here, so maybe someone else could chip in.

I hope they chip in, because I am thinking of getting some prints done myself.

THANKS SFL

[Chuck Nacke]

Steve,

 

Just took a look at the first page of your images on Alamy and to me and on my monitor

the last ones on your first page look a bit too contrasty.  I work on a PC running Win 10 64bit

my current monitor is a 24' DELL Ultra-Sharp.  I calibrate with a Spyder5 and I keep my

brightness down to about 60%, before I run a calibration.

 

In terms of printing, I also photograph a lot of art work for artists as well as large auction

houses, just finished photographing a large painting for one of the largest in London.

Each time I shoot a painting or any photographic copy work I shoot the piece with a full

color chart, have both DATACOLOR and PANTONE, I use which ever the client prefers.

I shoot everything with 36MP DSLR's and strobes,  The first image that I process from RAW

or NEF in LightRoom (LR) is the image with the color chart and then I use exactly the same

settings to process the final image of the painting, then I save all images as 16bit TIFF's

in aRGB color.  On large pieces when I need to do multiple exposures or frames that I stitch

into one large image, to match the actual size of the art, my finished file is often over

700MB's in 16bit color at 300PPI.

 

By working this way it is easy for the client to make large prints, reproduce in a print catalogue

or to downsize and convert to sRGB for web and email use.

 

I also do not go by what I see on my monitor, I go by the histogram in LR and Photoshop.

I use to do a lot of inkjet printing, but now I just refer the client to a lab and I always get the

lab's color profile to save images for them to print.

 

Chuck

[Bill Kuta]

On these kinds of questions, I think we have to remember that the projected-light image on a monitor and the reflected-light image from a print are simply different things.

[wiskerke]

1 hour ago, Chuck Nacke said:

Steve,

 

Just took a look at the first page of your images on Alamy and to me and on my monitor

the last ones on your first page look a bit too contrasty.  I work on a PC running Win 10 64bit

my current monitor is a 24' DELL Ultra-Sharp.  I calibrate with a Spyder5 and I keep my

brightness down to about 60%, before I run a calibration.

 

In terms of printing, I also photograph a lot of art work for artists as well as large auction

houses, just finished photographing a large painting for one of the largest in London.

Each time I shoot a painting or any photographic copy work I shoot the piece with a full

color chart, have both DATACOLOR and PANTONE, I use which ever the client prefers.

I shoot everything with 36MP DSLR's and strobes,  The first image that I process from RAW

or NEF in LightRoom (LR) is the image with the color chart and then I use exactly the same

settings to process the final image of the painting, then I save all images as 16bit TIFF's

in aRGB color.  On large pieces when I need to do multiple exposures or frames that I stitch

into one large image, to match the actual size of the art, my finished file is often over

700MB's in 16bit color at 300PPI.

 

By working this way it is easy for the client to make large prints, reproduce in a print catalogue

or to downsize and convert to sRGB for web and email use.

 

I also do not go by what I see on my monitor, I go by the histogram in LR and Photoshop.

I use to do a lot of inkjet printing, but now I just refer the client to a lab and I always get the

lab's color profile to save images for them to print.

 

Chuck

 

Looks perfect.

My workflow is about the same.

Never heard of Datacolor, but it looks an awful lot like the XRite ColorChecker aka Macbeth Chart to us greybeards. Some will know it as the Munsell Card in some parts of the world.

I add a QP 101 Card and my business card with very fine print. Sometimes an old Kodak Gray scale. They still exist btw. The color one was widely used, but has always been rubbish. When doing something that has been restored, it can be useful to include though because older images will probably have one included in the frame.

The XRite chart is super useful because there's an automated routine to profile a camera based upon it in Photoshop.

And now for Capture One as well.

 

Funny there's a parallel discussion running here.

 

wim

[MDM]

As others have said, your images do not look dark at all to me and they look correctly exposed/developed as far as it is possible to tell. My monitor is set quite dark  (90cd/m2 in a darkish room for print matching with my inkjet printer). The darker the room, the darker the screen needs to be. It does sound like your screen is set very bright - if you have a hardware profiler then use that to set screen brightness and leave it alone after that. The histogram is a great indicator.

 

If you got prints that are too dark and the images are at similar levels to your images here, then it may be a problem with the lab you used. The pro labs (such as Loxley and One Vision in the UK) generally offer a free set of test prints as well as advice on colour management and colour profiles for the media they use. If you use Lightroom then the soft proofing is excellent and very easy to set up. 

[Chuck Nacke]

Wim,

 

Datacolor is the company that makes the Spyder calibration tools, I'm currently using the Spyder5Pro.

 

Chuck

[SFL]

I would like to add a couple things to what I said earlier.

 

When I mentioned my workflow about printing via a pro lab, I made an assumption that your monitor is calibrated (with a hardware).  That is the first step in colour management.  Without the monitor calibration,  there is no point of soft proofing.

 

A small (well known) tip.  When you soft proof in either CS or Lightroom, just before clicking on the menu (I use shortcut, it is easier) or ticking the box of 'Soft Proof', look away.  Otherwise, you will be horrified by the change.  In reality the change itself is not that huge,  but your eyes and brain are tricked by it.  If you look away, you may notice that the change is subtler than otherwise.  It is inevitable as the colour gamuts of RGB (image file) and CMYK (printer) are different, so you will loose some colours/saturation etc. That is why you need a printer profile. (The printer profile is a translator sitting between two different languages.)  During soft proofing, you work on your image again to make the soft proofed version look as close as to the original version of your image by comparing the two side by side.

 

As Bill mentioned, the result of prints will also look different according to which paper you use due to less white in specular highlights area, etc. (matt, lustre, metallic, textured...).  I buy a sample pack of lab's paper stock and decide which paper I am going to use first and talk to the lab for advice and suggestions, which printer profiles, etc.  That decision of what type of paper will also have an implication as to what type of printing method it is going to be (C type or Gliclée, etc).  

 

I am not claiming myself as an expert on colour mangagement, so please correct me if I gave any misinformation.

 

Sung

 

(PS)  Writing is not my forte because English is not my first languague.  I hope it is not badly explained.

[Harry Harrison]

Agree with all the above but one 'trick' I follow (I think it was from Charlie Waite) is to look at my image against a white background for a final evaluation, they often look darker than I had imagined that way. In Lightroom I just make the 'Lights Out' colour as white. Typically a print is going to have a white mount/surround so it seems like a fair test. This is in addition to soft proofing, not instead of.

[chris_rabe]

Some good info in here - having experienced this myself recently, I'll be following through a lot of this this coming weekend.

 

Have been pretty much a screen only person until recently, and my ignorance in printing kind of caught me off guard

 

 

[wiskerke]

Carried over from https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/11112-no-sales-no-zooms-no-views/page/7

 

Mine are at 100 cd /m2

When I was working in a brighter room they were a bit higher.

 

16 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

No direct light at daytime nor at nighttime.

Now where's my lux meter?

Ok let's get a camera then: At 100 ISO it's 1/8s at F 2.0.

My phone says 45 Lux. Which would be around 1/4s.

 

I'll do daytime tomorrow.

 

Daytime reading from a 18% grey card.

No additional light, just bright sunlight coming in from my main workspace:

At 100 ISO it's 1/8s at F 2.0.

With my working light on, led bouncing from the ceiling:

At 100 ISO it's 1/10s at F 2.0.

I'm amazed at the consistency. It looks so much brighter, probably because I'm looking at my workspace flooded with bright sunlight at the moment. I am in a side room on the shadow side, if that makes sense. I can use blackout curtains between the main workspace and this room btw.

 

Metering away and thinking about those values, it dawned on me that in the ideal situation an 18% grey in Photoshop on the monitor should read about the same as an 18% grey card placed in front of it.

 

wim

[SFL]

2 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

Carried over from https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/11112-no-sales-no-zooms-no-views/page/7

 

 

 

Daytime reading from a 18% grey card.

No additional light, just bright sunlight coming in from my main workspace:

At 100 ISO it's 1/8s at F 2.0.

With my working light on, led bouncing from the ceiling:

At 100 ISO it's 1/10s at F 2.0.

I'm amazed at the consistency. It looks so much brighter, probably because I'm looking at my workspace flooded with bright sunlight at the moment. I am in a side room on the shadow side, if that makes sense. I can use blackout curtains between the main workspace and this room btw.

 

Metering away and thinking about those values, it dawned on me that in the ideal situation an 18% grey in Photoshop on the monitor should read about the same as an 18% grey card placed in front of it.

 

wim

 

What is your LED's Kelvin degree?  Can you buy a 6500K?  A while ago, I bought a 6000K.  Do you think it's good enough?

 

I suppose you can only do reflective meter reading, but isn't your screen more reflective?  Or is it negligible?

 

Sung

[MDM]

1 hour ago, chris_rabe said:

Some good info in here - having experienced this myself recently, I'll be following through a lot of this this coming weekend.

 

Have been pretty much a screen only person until recently, and my ignorance in printing kind of caught me off guard

 

 

 

You can get away without proper colour management if you never print your images but it is essential for printing, especially if you print your own stuff. You may never even realise you are way off if all you do is submit online. 

 

It is not difficult to follow a basic colour managed procedure - you don't need to actually understand the theory, which can be somewhat daunting, to apply it. I bought my first inkjet printer in 1997 and it was pioneering stuff back then - all trial and error before Adobe introduced colour management in Photoshop v5.5 or thereabouts. I started using it in Photoshop 6 (not CS6) and I have been using colour management ever since. It is really simple to implement although it does always need a bit of manual tweaking in practice. White skin tones are one of the real testers. 

 

The first (and vital thing) is to do a hardware monitor calibration. 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2019 by MDM

[chris_rabe]

1 hour ago, MDM said:

 

You can get away without proper colour management if you never print your images but it is essential for printing, especially if you print your own stuff. You may never even realise you are way off if all you do is submit online. 

 

It is not difficult to follow a basic colour managed procedure - you don't need to actually understand the theory, which can be somewhat daunting, to apply it. I bought my first inkjet printer in 1997 and it was pioneering stuff back then - all trial and error before Adobe introduced colour management in Photoshop v5.5 or thereabouts. I started using it in Photoshop 6 (not CS6) and I have been using colour management ever since. It is really simple to implement although it does always need a bit of manual tweaking in practice. White skin tones are one of the real testers. 

 

The first (and vital thing) is to do a hardware monitor calibration. 

 

 

 

Monitor is calibrated, and I was very happy with the colours comparing prints to my screen. But I still left the luminance above "recommended" because it just looked to dim. It never occurred to me the knock on effect it would have with printing

 

It looks like I have had more of a processing issue with high contrast images, but I have a limited set of images to compare against.

 

 

[M.Chapman]

2 hours ago, wiskerke said:

Carried over from https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/11112-no-sales-no-zooms-no-views/page/7

 

Daytime reading from a 18% grey card.

No additional light, just bright sunlight coming in from my main workspace:

At 100 ISO it's 1/8s at F 2.0.

With my working light on, led bouncing from the ceiling:

At 100 ISO it's 1/10s at F 2.0.

I'm amazed at the consistency. It looks so much brighter, probably because I'm looking at my workspace flooded with bright sunlight at the moment. I am in a side room on the shadow side, if that makes sense. I can use blackout curtains between the main workspace and this room btw.

 

Metering away and thinking about those values, it dawned on me that in the ideal situation an 18% grey in Photoshop on the monitor should read about the same as an 18% grey card placed in front of it.

 

wim

 

My screen measures at 200 cd/m2 (using i1Pro) which is probably a bit bright, but my room is reasonably lit.

 

If I convert my numbers (from the other thread) to the same f.no and ISO as you, but I was using white photo paper* I get the following. *Unfortunately I don't have an 18% grey card that I trust 

• A white sheet of photo paper when placed horizontal on a nearby table gives a metered exposure of 1/16th at f/2 ISO 100
• My monitor screen, when displaying 100% white (R=G=B=255) gives a metered exposure of 1/125th at f/2 ISO 100
• So white on my monitor screen appears about 8x brighter than white on photo-paper in the room where my computer is.
• But, if I was inspecting prints I'd take them somewhere brighter, which (coincidentally?) I find also meters at 1/125th f/2 ISO 100.

NB. I'm not saying my monitor brightness setting is right or wrong, I'm just reporting what it is.

 

Regarding adjusting monitor brightness when displaying an 18% grey image so it matches the light reflected from an 18% grey card (in your viewing environment). This seems to makes sense, with a few caveats..

 

1) What RGB value should be used to generate an 18% grey image? Wikipedia gives a variety of possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray. Might it be simpler to match the brightness of a monitor displaying R=G=B=255 with the light reflected from white photo paper in your viewing environment? 

2) This might be a good setup for making prints (as per the subject of this thread). But for making sales via Alamy, customers will be viewing thumbnails/images on computer screens and not looking at prints. Many usages are now on-line (+print), so maybe it's better to adjust the monitor to a brightness level using some other criteria?

 

I'm sure this whole thing is way more complex than my musings. But, as a result of these two threads, I turned down the wick on my monitor slightly from 200 cd/m2 to 160 cd/m2 (using i1Pro). I then revisited the latest batch of images I was preparing for Alamy, and found that I now prefer them if I lighten their mid-tones slightly (the highlights and shadows were already set based on 0-255 RGB range). Mmm...

 

Mark

[wiskerke]

4 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

 

My screen measures at 200 cd/m2 (using i1Pro) which is probably a bit bright, but my room is reasonably lit.

 

If I convert my numbers (from the other thread) to the same f.no and ISO as you, but I was using white photo paper* I get the following. *Unfortunately I don't have an 18% grey card that I trust 

• A white sheet of photo paper when placed horizontal on a nearby table gives a metered exposure of 1/16th at f/2 ISO 100
• My monitor screen, when displaying 100% white (R=G=B=255) gives a metered exposure of 1/125th at f/2 ISO 100
• So white on my monitor screen appears about 8x brighter than white on photo-paper in the room where my computer is.
• But, if I was inspecting prints I'd take them somewhere brighter, which (coincidentally?) I find also meters at 1/125th f/2 ISO 100.

NB. I'm not saying my monitor brightness setting is right or wrong, I'm just reporting what it is.

 

Regarding adjusting monitor brightness when displaying an 18% grey image so it matches the light reflected from an 18% grey card (in your viewing environment). This seems to makes sense, with a few caveats..

 

1) What RGB value should be used to generate an 18% grey image? Wikipedia gives a variety of possibilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray. Might it be simpler to match the brightness of a monitor displaying R=G=B=255 with the light reflected from white photo paper in your viewing environment? 

2) This might be a good setup for making prints (as per the subject of this thread). But for making sales via Alamy, customers will be viewing thumbnails/images on computer screens and not looking at prints. Many usages are now on-line (+print), so maybe it's better to adjust the monitor to a brightness level using some other criteria?

 

I'm sure this whole thing is way more complex than my musings. But, as a result of these two threads, I turned down the wick on my monitor slightly from 200 cd/m2 to 160 cd/m2 (using i1Pro). I then revisited the latest batch of images I was preparing for Alamy, and found that I now prefer them if I lighten their mid-tones slightly (the highlights and shadows were already set based on 0-255 RGB range). Mmm...

 

Mark

 

200 cd is very bright. Is it a Mac by any chance?

 

Middle gray/grey is meant as the average of a scene where half of it is white and the other black.

Whether this is 18% or 13.6% or the mean doesn't matter much. Because despite all arithmetic it's the other way around: it is the shade of gray that produces a good image when you aim a lightmeter at it, or a camera.

 

So in your case your screen should be half white and half black. While the meter/camera should be set to average and not matrix.
Why not a white sheet of paper? Because the 18% is the yardstick in photography.

 

Your images look fine to me btw. I would not worry too much. The human eye is very adaptable. Which is good, but also what's wrong with it. 😉

 

wim

 

Edited March 8, 2019 by wiskerke

[wiskerke]

7 hours ago, SFL said:

 

What is your LED's Kelvin degree?  Can you buy a 6500K?  A while ago, I bought a 6000K.  Do you think it's good enough?

 

I suppose you can only do reflective meter reading, but isn't your screen more reflective?  Or is it negligible?

 

Sung

 

Yes I have a 6500K, but I'm using a 4000K one.

The 6500K is a 4000lm 50W no name one. They all come from China of course. Really cheap. However Photoshop says it's 5100K not 6500K and I have to set the green-magenta slider to +47M to get it to neutral. So it has quite a greenish tint. And I think it's a bit too bright. This is mine.

I think I have seen somewhere that the claimed CRI is 70. Which would be terrible, even for cheap leds.

The 5100K is actually more desirable for ambient lighting: close to D50 which is used for viewing booths and workrooms. Not with a CRI of 70 though. Btw I have a real one.

 

The light I'm using is a 20W 4000K 1600 lm one by Masterplug UK. Who probably only put the label on it. Or not even that.

Mine is from Hornbach and a bit cheaper, but definitely the same product. Prices are all over the place btw. I've seen something very closely resembling my 6500K one for GBP 67. Mine was Eur 14,95 = GBP 12.85.

The 4000K is really close according to Photoshop who thinks it's 3950K and I have to set the green-magenta slider to +15M to get it to neutral. So this also has a slight greenish tint. Not noticeable to the naked eye of course.

CRI is claimed to be 80. Still very low in my book.

 

My displays are very non-reflective. EIZO CS2420 and CS240. My older displays are Dell u2410's: also non-reflective.

The main difference is that the Eizo's have a far better uniformity. Like perfect. The Dells not so much.

 

wim

[M.Chapman]

9 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

200 cd is very bright. Is it a Mac by any chance?

 

Middle gray/grey is meant as the average of a scene where half of it is white and the other black.

Whether this is 18% or 13.6% or the mean doesn't matter much. Because despite all arithmetic it's the other way around: it is the shade of gray that produces a good image when you aim a lightmeter at it, or a camera.

 

So in your case your screen should be half white and half black. While the meter/camera should be set to average and not matrix.
Why not a white sheet of paper? Because the 18% is the yardstick in photography.

 

Your images look fine to me btw. I would not worry too much. The human eye is very adaptable. Which is good, but also what's wrong with it. 😉

 

wim

 

 

It's an HP 23xi monitor, calibrated with i1 Pro. I've now set up 2 profiles (200cd/m2 and 160cd/m2) so I can easily swap between them. I'll probably use 160 when it's slightly darker in my room (evening/night) and perhaps the 200 when it's brighter.

 

50/50 black white. That's an interesting idea. I could display a black/white checker board. I suppose I could also print one to use as a grey card, possibly even suitable as a WB card if my black ink is dark and neutral enough and the photo card is a good white? Although deciding on a suitable fine-ness for the checkerboard has tradeoffs. Too fine risks messing up the 50/50 ratio. Too coarse risks metering issues. Then there's moire.... Mmmm.... not sure it's worth the hassle. It would have to be used with the camera defocussed. I already have a small white balance colour checking target, I just don't have an 18% grey card I trust. There was one in the back of Scott Kelby's book, but it seems too light to me.

 

Thanks for the comment on my image brightness.

 

Mark

[SFL]

8 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

Yes I have a 6500K, but I'm using a 4000K one.

The 6500K is a 4000lm 50W no name one. They all come from China of course. Really cheap. However Photoshop says it's 5100K not 6500K and I have to set the green-magenta slider to +47M to get it to neutral. So it has quite a greenish tint. And I think it's a bit too bright. This is mine.

I think I have seen somewhere that the claimed CRI is 70. Which would be terrible, even for cheap leds.

The 5100K is actually more desirable for ambient lighting: close to D50 which is used for viewing booths and workrooms. Not with a CRI of 70 though. Btw I have a real one.

 

The light I'm using is a 20W 4000K 1600 lm one by Masterplug UK. Who probably only put the label on it. Or not even that.

Mine is from Hornbach and a bit cheaper, but definitely the same product. Prices are all over the place btw. I've seen something very closely resembling my 6500K one for GBP 67. Mine was Eur 14,95 = GBP 12.85.

The 4000K is really close according to Photoshop who thinks it's 3950K and I have to set the green-magenta slider to +15M to get it to neutral. So this also has a slight greenish tint. Not noticeable to the naked eye of course.

CRI is claimed to be 80. Still very low in my book.

 

My displays are very non-reflective. EIZO CS2420 and CS240. My older displays are Dell u2410's: also non-reflective.

The main difference is that the Eizo's have a far better uniformity. Like perfect. The Dells not so much.

 

wim

 

Thank you Wim for the detailed information.

 

With my imited knowledge, a while ago I bought a LED because it was advertised as 'daylight balanced'.  However as you say I also find it very greenish (though it looks like daylight to naked eyes).  How do you measure the K degrees with Photoshop? 

 

Recently I have done quite a few interior photography for clients.  A few places were lit by both daylightish lights (LED I guess) and very yellow lights.  In post production, it was difficult/impossible to find a happy medium to balance both lights.   

 

Sung

 

[wiskerke]

3 hours ago, SFL said:

 

Thank you Wim for the detailed information.

 

With my imited knowledge, a while ago I bought a LED because it was advertised as 'daylight balanced'.  However as you say I also find it very greenish (though it looks like daylight to naked eyes).  How do you measure the K degrees with Photoshop? 

 

Recently I have done quite a few interior photography for clients.  A few places were lit by both daylightish lights (LED I guess) and very yellow lights.  In post production, it was difficult/impossible to find a happy medium to balance both lights.   

 

Sung

 

 

Take a picture with only your LED as a light source. Preferably with a gray card or a gray patch in the frame. QP gray patches are perfect, so is a ColorChecker or a ColorChecker Passport. But there lots more out there.

Now open your RAW image in Adobe Camera Raw. Choose the dropper or white balance tool 1 and tap on the gray patch or the middle gray patch. The white balance slider will now show the color temperature. The green-magenta slider will show the amount of green or magenta in the spectrum. It does this by showing the amount it took to correct the color cast, so a +40 Magenta means there's a green color cast of + 40 in the light source. Most camera's will allow you to view these figures as well. Usually hidden in the function set white balance.

wiki

 

Interiors with different light sources can be a nightmare. But remember or think about how difficult it was on film. Then it's not as bad anymore.

There's no simple method. Well the simplest is to overpower everything with strobes, the quick and dirty method of the past.

Now with not just tungsten or fluorescent, but all sorts of fluorescent and all sorts of leds, it's mostly a pp job. If you do it long enough, you'll get better at it.  Instruction video (this is pretty basic though).

Google for something like correcting interiors with mixed light sources in photoshop. Mixed lights being the important part.

 

wim

 

edit: why the gray card and not a white sheet of paper? White is never white. The gray card is our yardstick. However in this case you'll get a fair approximation if you use a handful of different sheets of white paper and average the reading. Maybe against a white wall and measure that as well. My white wall has a green cast of 3 and a blue cast of 150 compared to my QP card. Which is normal as there are optic brighteners in most white papers and in most wall paints. Sometimes well into the UV, which we don't see, but our camera's will see and show it as a blue cast.

Edited March 8, 2019 by wiskerke

[SFL]

8 minutes ago, wiskerke said:

 

Take a picture with only your LED as a light source. Preferably with a gray card or a gray patch in the frame. QP gray patches are perfect, so is a ColorChecker or a ColorChecker Passport. But there lots more out there.

Now open your RAW image in Adobe Camera Raw. Choose the dropper or white balance tool 1 and tap on the gray patch or the middle gray patch. The white balance slider will now show the color temperature. The green-magenta slider will show the amount of green or magenta in the spectrum. It does this by showing the amount it took to correct the color cast, so a +40 Magenta means there's a green color cast of + 40 in the light source. Most camera's will allow you to view these figures as well. Usually hidden in the function set white balance.

wiki

 

Interiors with different light sources can be a nightmare. But remember or think about how difficult it was on film. Then it's not as bad anymore.

There's no simple method. Well the simplest is to overpower everything with strobes, the quick and dirty method of the past.

Now with not just tungsten or fluorescent, but all sorts of fluorescent and all sorts of leds, it's mostly a pp job. If you do it long enough, you'll get better at it.  Instruction video (this is pretty basic though).

Google for something like correcting interiors with mixed light sources in photoshop. Mixed lights being the important part.

 

wim

 

 

Oh, I see.  ACR...  So the same with the Lightroom.  Never think it that way.  It's pretty obvious, isn't it?

 

With regard to interior shots, thank you again for the info.  I have been using either several Gradient tools for various areas in LR or masks, layers and merging in PS to deal with this problem.  Your are right, the more you do, the better you get.  

 

Thank you, Wim.

 

Sung

[Steve F]

Hi everyone,

I'm back! Thanks a lot for the tips and advice. I do have a calibrated monitor. I got hold of a printer profile from my lab and got a lot of prints done after seeing some proofs they did for me first. It actually turns out, the hardest thing is selling your prints!!! haha. I'm trying to sell them as a finished article that can be hung on a wall, but frames more than double the price of the prints so....

 

I've printed some on canvas (they tack the canvas onto a wooden frame with corner tensioners like a painter's canvas). They're pretty robust, and have come out pretty well, but I'm not totally happy about the quality. The colours seem somewhat subdued. Maybe this is a result of printing on canvas? I haven't tried sending the printing lab an oversaturated JPEG yet to compensate.....

 

I've also had some printed onto Dibond (a thin plastic layer with a thin aluminium sheet front and back) with archival quality photo paper on one face and an aluminium hanger on the back. Quality is great - because it's photo paper - but they're also quite fragile because you end up with a large sheet of photo paper out in the atmosphere with no glass in front.

 

I've thought about getting a laminated type print, which looks really great, but costs £150+

 

Anyway, that's my experience so far. Being an artist is just as hard work as being a photographer!