Hi,
I need some advice for preparing photographs for printing in darktable. I’ve edited some in darktable the way I wanted them to look like. I also used a calibrated display and an icc softproof thingy from the printing company. So, I’m not looking for perfection but the printed images semed too lifeless. There was a lack of saturation and contrast. So, what I was planning to do was just to push these two values and propably this will make the trick but I wanted to ask here first if anybody has some experienc, best practice, advice. Or for example a hint on how to look at what histogram to make some estimations for the result of the print. So any advice ist very appreciated.
can’t stress this enough. Darktable is a great piece of software. thanks to all making this possible.
Does the print appear to be close to what you see on the monitor? What kind of paper did you have the print made on? Is this a reputable photo lab or the local drug store?
I think it’s close but it lacks a bit of hights. All in all I would say it’s too dark. That’s why I was asking how I could interpret the histogram to make estimations on the print. It’s a fuji photo paper so it should be fine. Also it’s a proper photo lab. So it’ propably on me ; )
Maybe you have the brightness of the monitor too high? Remember that the paper just reflects light, and it will never be as bright as a monitor unless you properly balance both light sources.
Like guillermo says, make sure your calibration is around 120cdm2. Then move the icc the lab gave you to .config/darktable/color/out. Once you turn on the soft proof, the display should more closely match what it will look like in the paper. The icc is only used for seeing the softproof, dont apply it to the export. The export should stay with the output color profile.
Hi, thank you. That’s what I did. And the monitor is close to the prints if you set to account that the prints aren’t backlit. So my vision must have been distorted while editing. but I found something out. My histogram was set to “scale to logarithmic” and for printing it’s better to set it so “scale to linear”. If you get a “hilly” landscape in the linear histogram it’ll most likely become a nice print. But it’s hard to see in logarithmic mode.