acmc

I calibrated again, this time at Native and 80 and taking into account backlit screen vs. paper it is very very close - I'm satisfied with it for the first time EVER! Especially when I turn on the soft proofing the display matches the prints well. Turning on soft-proofing makes them a bit bland in comparison but I suppose that's to be expected. I checked the image with your action that shows blown highlights to make sure it was exposed properly. My whites in this forum are still not white but I don't care about that unless it's important for some other reason. I just want to be able to make prints with confidence. Good Morning to you; it is Saturday night here and I am going to a party where I think I will have a bourbon & ginger to celebrate.

Oh okay I will run the calibration again. Just one desktop with this Asus monitor attached to it. Yes, the Munki is set to Version 2 for sure.

This is what I have wound up doing for now. I reduced the brightness on the monitor to 80. Then when I ran the calibrator on Native / 100 It showed that the right brightness should be 100 but it was reading 182. So at that point I reduced the brightness and ended up at 40 to get the green checkmark of 100. Then I completed the calibration. To fix the color, I went into the "user" color mode in the menu and adjusted the R the G and the B sliders until I got colors that match my prints. I still don't think this is really correct, because when I am looking at this forum page, which should be blue and white, the white part has a greenish/yellow cast in comparison to the white items on my desktop. Browser is Firefox.

Yes, I have been through the troubleshooting steps many times. I truly have tried to read *everything* and solve this problem on my own! (Which is why I finally walked away in frustration and let my Raw class membership expire. Now I regret that because there is a waiting list to get back in.) Since I have the best match I've ever had right now, I am going to wait until tonight and see how it looks when there is no other light in the room except my new bulbs. I'm just worried that the monitor will adjust itself again, since I don't see any way to make sure that doesn't happen. I called ASUS last night to make sure I had it on the right "mode" to use an external calibration and their customer service is pretty clueless about the whole thing. Thank you very much for walking me through these steps. I'll post when I see what happens tonight after dark.

I have some new information. I was actually taking a picture on my iphone to post to show you how bright it is in here. Thought about the fact that the monitor is actually sitting at the front of an amoire. I decided to actually pull the monitor out and set it in the middle of the bright floor and recalibrate. After this recalibration my prints almost match the monitor! So it appears to me that the actual monitor is being affected by the ambient light during calibration. Past recalibrations have been done at night with the lights off.

Oh okay. I do understand that. I said they are "just too dark" . Not much. In this room with the lights on it is brighter and whiter than in the next room with the sun streaming in. The difference is when I am holding the print directly in the sunshine.

It's very bright in here - I am fairly sure that's not the problem. I have three bulbs 800 lumens each directly above my head in a fixture that I can almost touch with my hand if I am standing. the room is about 2 meters by 3 1/2 meters with almost white walls and an almost white floor. Very bright. They look a little better in daylight but not correct. They still don't match my monitor at all. How is my light affecting my calibration results when I turn the lights off during calibration per Damien's instructions? I just purchased these bulbs specifically so I would have correct lighting in here. I do have a 5000K craft light that I can place directly in front of the print but that still doesn't make them look correct.

When I take them outside they are more acceptable - skin tones look pretty normal, etc. BUT the color is so different from how it looked in my edit. It's particularly obvious in the bright one that it has green undertones in the white. In the dark one, it looks acceptable in the bright sunlight but just by dumb luck because it is very different from how the file appears on my monitor. Inside, I wouldn't want it displayed because it is just too dark. On your monitor do the white shirts look white? I'm trying to figure out if I have some obscure setting wrong in processing the file versus having some setting on the actual monitor that needs changing.

Here's a bright one...

Here's one with darker tones

I am writing from calibration hell. Truthfully I have never been able to get prints to match my calibration and I finally just walked away from it for awhile and learned about other aspects of photography. I’m back for a second try. I just ordered new prints being very careful with the colorspace. They are all dark, warm and green as if there is a color space issue, but I can see in ACR that they are sRGB and in PS that they are sRGB. I have the color set to North America General Purpose 2 and the Assign profile setting is Working RGB just in case. Monitor is ASUS VS239H, calibrated with ColorMunki Display per your instructions 80/D55 but my prints are too dark and warm. The light fixture in the room where I want to edit has 3 4000K light bulbs in it. Prints are from MPixPro. (I downloaded their color profile; the prints don’t match with it on or off.) What should I try next?