Damien Symonds

It's showing good promise so far.

Needless to say, feel free to post a photo any time you need assistance.

You haven't actually said what's wrong? Why are you unhappy with the calibration?

2) When it comes down to technical basics, the files you're sending to the lab are just a bunch of ones and zeros. Simple binary data that comprises all digital files. The screen upon which you edited is completely irrelevant. All that matters is for your calibrated screen to show those ones and zeros the same as the lab printed them.

1) For the purposes of calibration, you must ignore those profiles. They'll become important later, but can only be utilised after you are confident with the calibration.

Gosh, yes, maximum is madness!

I have to leave now, for a little while. Basically, I think your settings should be 300/300 (rather than 300/450) and High, or even Medium, not Maximum for the image quality.

No, no. Save the PDFs from the PSDs again, and take another look at this screen: Can you take a screenshot of your screen, and show me? I need to see the settings you used.

Is this an accurate sum of the parts? I mean, the individual PDFs you merged to make this one - did they add up to 347-ish MB? Or has a whole lot of extra size been added in the merging process?

It's never a waste of time. I view every opportunity to remind people of the importance of in-camera achievements over post-processing achievements as a valuable use of time.

Can you find an example photo of a male portrait in similar lighting to yours? We need to be discussing apples with apples here.

Well, it was because I wanted to preserve the flooring, you know? In the ones in the tutorial, there tended to be only backdrop visible. So I was able to use a plain 100% opacity gradient. But when flooring is present, we generally need the backdrop to fade as naturally as possible into the floor. Am I making sense?

I don't know why your image wouldn't load, sorry. You're right, it's very small. I think it has good potential.

It can't hurt to try. But it's still merely a stop-gap measure until your calibrator arrives.

Oh, I understand now. Are you aware that you're basically making every attempt to sabotage your own photo here? The more you find to be critical of, the less chance you have of producing an image.

This sure is odd. Can you send it to me via this page?

Significantly less, yes.

No, it's a problem with the monitor profile. Well, the absence of one. Since there isn't one, I assume various programs are just having to "guess" at how to render colours accurately, and they're guessing differently.

Yep, the laptop ones, exactly as normal.

Thanks. Which calibrator do you have?

Oh gosh, you must NEVER touch that screen. Back away from it slowly with your hands where I can see them! Seriously, it's horrible. It does not play nicely with calibration.

Sorry, I must have misunderstood your original comment. I thought you said you preferred that arm position?

I've never heard of a laptop screen that has buttons for adjusting colour.

I'm proud to say that Andrea is an alumni of my Raw and Levels classes. First, have you read this? You say the light is very similar, but in truth it's not. Every degree further back the light source is, the more strongly the skin texture is exaggerated. And of course your subject is likely to have much more skin texture to begin with anyway. Are you at least familiar with dodge and burn?

If we find this to be true - that is, if they actually require you to convert your images to their profiles before sending - then you must run away from them as fast as you can. Sadly, there are still some labs who do this. However if, as Samantha said, the profiles are provided for soft-proofing purposes, this is a good thing.