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Is my calibration wrong - or are my prints wrong?!


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I just had to reinstall windows and everything - bah what a drag!

Anyway so I started from scratch with Spyder 5 Elite, and followed you calibration instructions to the letter.
After calibration my images look great on screen, just as I expected with clean colour and clean accurate skin tones. 

However when I compare them to my test prints I got printed last week, the test prints look quite green/or perhaps too warm. O.o

As the screen looks great and I often use the CMYK numbers to get good skintones in photoshop, my instinct tells me that it's the prints that are wrong. I used a pro-lab but occasionally have had issues with them in the past. 

Is there any way to check which is wrong? And do these images look slightly green/yellow to you? 

The white background behind my son shoudl be white/grey and certainly not the cream colour I'm seeing on the print.
The background behind my daughter should be greys with very little greens or yellow in there.
On my screen the skintones aren't warm, as my children have very British pale skin in real life! :) 

Thanks!

kids-290117-09E 9x6.jpg

kids-290117-331E 9x6.jpg

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I think the prints are right.  I'm seeing cream behind your son, and everything does look slightly yellow/green.

But I'm concerned about this:

8 hours ago, Ellie Cotton said:

However when I compare them to my test prints I got printed last week

Surely you have some others as well?  Some older ones?

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ah rats! well yes I do have others but I am a bit disorganised with my filing systems and especially after having to reinstall windows and all my software etc.

I found one other I printed recently and although very subtle, the print it does seem to be greener. so looks like the calibration is wrong.

I will try and adjust is, and also send some more to the printer and try again. 

 

Thanks! This drives me nuts as I am a stickler for skintones. 

 

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Thing is, I don't really trust them. I don't know whether printers in the UK are more flakey but US / AUS but I often seem to get different results week in week out. 
And others say similar. Or do you think we are all just badly callibrated?! I am guessing so!

 

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So I followed you instructions Damien and dialled the color setting down to 5000k which looks a little better, but the monitor settings were on 6500k. 

If I do the callibration and this time set the Sypder to 5000k and the monitor to 5000k... the brightness is an issue.

When it gets to adjusting the brightness, even at 100% brightness on the screen that's reading 70, and the target is 120!

Tried changing the Spyder brightness from 80 to 100, still can't get within the target, and then from 100 to 120, still can't get within target..

 

Any suggestions how to proceed?>!

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The brightness is about right, not so much of an issue as colour. But I can't get the colour right with SpyderTune, I need the screen to be much warmer (yellow) to match the prints, but it either looks too cold or too green. And I'm moving the sliders all the way to the top, trying out various scenarios.. Any suggestions?!

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But my questions is - when I change the monitor colour setting to 5000k, why does suddenly the calibration software think that the display is too dim? It won't proceed to do a full calibration beacuse I can't get anywhere near the target brightness.

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