I'm hoping someone here has some words of wisdom, because I'm stumped. I recently created a bunch of calendars in iPhoto using photos I'd processed in Aperture (many of them using Joseph's handy-dandy 4-up AppleScript) and I was really disappointed by how darkened the images were in the finished product. I've had luck with Apple calendars and books in the past and didn't anticipate any problem creating and sending projects from my new MacBook Pro.
Holding the finished product up to the monitor is like night and day, really. (Maybe not a completely fair comparison, but the difference is major.) I spoke with someone in iPhoto tech support and they had me pull up the file that was sent to Apple, and it looks bright. I printed out a few versions on my black and white printer, and again the images (though not in color) are brighter than the finished calendar I received.
Is it really necessary to overly brighten images before printing them (via iPhoto) in an Apple calendar or book? Or do I need to calibrate my monitor in some way that I've not had to before? I love using the service to create books etc. but at this point I have no faith that I'm going to get a different result the second time around.
Anyone else have any experience with this?
Kathryn,
The easiest tip I can give you is to turn the brightness way down on your display when adjusting for print. Today’s displays are getting brighter and brighter, and a backlit screen is impossibly brighter than the printed page. Which means you could be adjusting images way darker than they should be, because they are so strongly backlit on your screen.
However, you can also do it by looking at the histogram. I’ve given lessons on reading the histogram a couple of times in my Live Training sessions. If you watch Live Training Session 008: Adjustments; Exposure and Enhance you’ll get a pretty good primer on the topic. In summary though, you’ll want to make sure that your histogram is showing data all the way to the right for a bright image.
Can you take a screenshot and post it for me to see? Just select any photo in the book that you see is printed much too dark, select the Adjustments tab so I can see the histogram (that’s this thing, just in case you’re not familiar [screenshot]). If you don’t have an easy way to host the screenshot somewhere, just email it to me at joseph@apertureexpert.com and I’ll post it here for you.
My guess from what you’ve said so far is that this is the problem. Especially since you referenced your new MacBook Pro, whereas it was fine before. Your new computer undoubtedly has a brighter screen than your last one.
All that said, if your images are brightened appropriately, then I think Apple owes you a reprint. You can easily argue that the histogram shows a properly exposed image and that it’s their problem, not yours, and get new ones made for you for free. So first thing’s first; let’s see how your histos look.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Kathryn sent me some images offline, which I’m reposting here with permission; [screenshot] and [screenshot]. Those two appear fine to me in the histogram and are likely how I would have adjusted them myself.
However the third one she sent, [screenshot (subject blurred for privacy)] is definitely adjusted too dark. The snow should be bright white, which on the histo would read pushing all the way to the right. Not past the wall (because that would be clipping), but considering how white the scene is, it should definitely be pushed to the edge.
So that said Kathryn… the first two; are they considerably darker than you think they should be in print? The histograms look pretty good to me; they aren’t too dark for sure, and overall look quite balanced.
Maybe you can snap a photo of the book itself for us to see? I know it won’t be completely accurate but it might give us an idea of what you’re seeing. Photograph the book on its own in regular indoor lighting, as you would be looking at it in a normal environment.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Thanks Joseph. I’m glad to hear that, for the most part, I’m treating the histogram appropriately.
The third photo had only highlight adjustments. Dumb. Don’t know how I missed that but I’ll definitely go back and play with it accordingly, brightening up the snow.
I’ll snap a few photos of the finished product and send them along when I can. Hopefully they’ll demonstrate the issue.
Thanks a lot!
Kathryn
I had this same issue last year when I put together a book of my kid’s first year. Apple agreed that the photos were too dark and sent me a new one free of charge. Unfortunately, the same thing happened and the photos were still too dark. I was editing on a 27” iMac and everything came out underexposed (even though for the re-print I went in and +1 the exposure on every shot). Part of my wife’s Xmas present last month is a photo book from our kids’ second year, however, I’ve been hesitant to send it through iphoto or aperture b/c of what I went through last year. I’ve been trying to find a different service to have it printed through.
I’m more of a video editor who uses FCP7 (none of that sill “x” stuff for me :) and I haven’t had issues with color on any of my final video edits. That said, I do know that the print world is different so perhaps I need to have a monitor calibration for printing done? Is there a monitor calibrator that you would recommend??
Dustin,
Calibrating your display for print can be very useful if you’re working with a known printer. If you have a local print house (or your own high-end printer at home) and can spend the time tweaking the calibration to make the two match (or, “match”, as it will never be identical, given that prints are reflective and a screen is backlit), calibrating can be very worthwhile. But when printing with a service like Apple’s printers, or Blurb, or any of the other consumer-level book printers, they basically expect that you do NOT have a calibrated screen, because after all, what would it be calibrated to?
All you can really do is ensure that the photo is technically accurate, which means reading the histogram. Forget what you see on screen, and read the histo. Check that brightness is as expected—basically unless you’re specifically going for a dark image, your histogram should have data nearly all the way to the right. To check color balance, if you have white in the scene, check that this area white has equal readings of R, G and B — if not, then it won’t be white. Once those things are in check, it’s up to the printer to get it right. And if they don’t, you can prove that what you sent is accurate by showing histos, and if they still can’t print it right, find a new printer.
It’s similar in video and film. If you’re editing for broadcast, a calibrate-able broadcast monitor is extremely expensive. However these days most people have plasma or LCD TVs at home, so editors will often use those as broadcast monitors. Calibrating your computer screen to look like a television is pretty much a waste of time, and video editors know better than most that the only truth is what’s on the scopes. It’s their job to make it right (like it’s your job to make your photo files right), and then it’s the broadcasters job (or the printers job) to not mess it up.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Dustin and Joseph,
I absolutely agree that calibrating - or to be more precise - profiling your display can be very helpful. As already mentioned the key to the dark print problem is however that most people have their monitors set too bright. Moreover the room lighting level where you work and tweak your images plays a vital role of how you perceive brightness and contrast on your screen.
The first aspect of “helpfulness” is that a monitor calibration device (colorimeter or spectrometer) also measures luminance values. With guided values as indicated by Joseph you are more likely to be able to judge whether e.g. a dark part of an image should still have details or whether it will probably just appear as black in the print. And - most importantly - you have a chance to notice if the luminance values of your screen are too high or maybe even too low at all.
Color management is much too complex that I would ever claim to be able to explain the issue here ( or anywhere else), but some basic ideas just to where the journey goes to:
A monitor colorimeter measures the RGB color values displayed on your screen during a kind of test run with known color patterns and compares the detected values with the ones that are expected from the source standard. The result is basically nothing else than a translation table of how expected/known RGB values are displayed on your screen - the so-called monitor profile. Software with color management capabilities consider this monitor profile to assist you in evaluating your images. Simplifying one could say that the setup profile is used to compensate for any color shift your monitor may produce. Please note, that all this still refers only to your monitor! Printing is a completely different thing and needs a separate assessment of how colors are reproduced on a known printer for a specific paper.
That said, Joseph, do you know if Aperture 3 offers an opportunity to soft proof?
I used to take advantage of that feature from time to time in Bibble 5 Pro (turning to AfterShot Pro in the future…) using specific ICC profiles for printer/paper combinations of my printing provider.
Kathryn, Dustin, if you would like to go into more detail I can recommend you the Northlight Images website to read on the color management issues and of course especially the “Why are my prints too dark” issue.
-Michael
Thanks Michael, that’s a great addition.
To answer your question… yes, Aperture does have a soft-proof feature. It’s at the bottom of the View menu; toggle Onscreen Proofing on and off, and choose your profile from the Proofing Profile menu [screenshot].
What’s always surprised me is that there’s no “Apple Aperture Book” profile, but then again I suppose if Apple included that, and people used it, and the results weren’t perfect, then they’d have to explain that to the users. Blah.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Michael,
Thanks for the information. This is definitely a realm I need to learn more about.
I have made one discovery in trying to understand my issue. I was unaware that there’s a preference setting in Aperture that determines the quality of JPGs exported when shared with iLife applications–in this case, when I was using the “show Aperture library” option in iPhoto.
By checking the Previews preference in Aperture, I discovered that (in my case) the Photo Preview and Photo Preview Quality settings had been limited in a way that resulted in a much smaller file size. Previously, I’d exported photos from Aperture to a folder on the desktop and then imported them into iPhoto, obviously with better results.
I had no idea that Previews in Aperture worked this way, so I thought I’d pass it along in case others were unaware of it as well.
I’m hoping that using the much larger JPEGs will result in better print results, though I’m not confident it alone will solve my darkness issue.
Kathryn
Kathryn,
Somehow I missed the fact that you were doing this in iPhoto. But as you suspected, it won’t make any difference in the darkness of the photos, just the quality (as in sharpness and/or compression artifacts).
I’ve written about Previews here a few times; here’s a really good post worth reading: “A Comprehensive Look at Thumbnails, Previews, and More in Aperture 3”.
In my own workflow, I don’t have Preview generation turned on by default. I leave it off and generate as-needed, by setting the keyboard shortcut shift-Return to the command Photos > Update Previews. I also have my Preview generation set quite small, but I don’t use them the way you did. This keeps my Library a bit smaller; having large preview JPGs generated for 150,000 photos would kinda make my library biggish ;-)
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Dark prints are a recurring problem and not solely due to screen brightness or printer profiling per se. I always calibrate my printer/ink/paper combinations, but recently, with a new Epson 3880 printer, found that each photo-processing software had its own problems with colour brightness. I have solved the problem by printing colour calibration charts, which the spectrophotometer reads, from each piece of software (Aperture, Lightroom, etc), thus producing unique printer profiles for each product combination. It works perfectly, and, although it may seem like a lots of work (each profile takes about 10 minutes to produce after the calibration prints have been made) it is worth it when one considers the waste of paper which occurs trying to match the desired output to the screen image by twiddling with “Brightness” and “Contrast”.
artH