What are text prints for?

[Cleyvosier]

Kinda confused about test prints. Are they printed before or after calibration. If before why am I gonna adjust to bad prints. I'm having a duh moment. Help.

[Christina Keddie]

Prints from a pro lab are the objective standard -- whatever your lab prints is how it reads your files.  That's how you'll establish a good baseline with your monitor calibration.

Follow Damien's calibration instructions, which tell you to get your prints BEFORE calibration.  Once you get those prints back, then you can confirm that your monitor is showing you exactly what you'll see in your prints.  If your prints are horridly blue, for instance, you'll want your calibration to make your monitor show you exactly the same kind of horrid blue.  Then (and only then!) you can be confident that when you edit the file, you're seeing it properly -- so when you take that horrid blue file and warm it up and edit it so it looks good on your screen, you can be confident that you're seeing it correctly while editing and that when you print the file, it will look as you see it on your screen.