How do I make my laptop display pictures the same way they appear when printed? Mac's have ColorSync, what about PC's?

[MC Webster]

I have a Dell I8200 laptop, running WinXP Pro. I use Adobe Photoshop 7 for working with pictures from my digital camera, and I want my laptop screen to display these pictures, the same way they end up looking when I print them off on my Epson 870 printer. I know Macs have a progam called ColorSync which does this, but is there a similar program for PC's? There is a control I have callled "Adobe Gamma", could I use this with my laptop screen at all to accomplish anything? Any ideas out there on how to make my laptop screen look beter?

 

[ProviaFan]

Use the Adobe Gamma thing in your control panel, and make sure that there's an "Adobe Gamma Loader" shortcut in your startup menu after you do the adobe gamma configuration. If not, make one and point it to "\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Calibration\Adobe Gamma Loader.exe" or wherever the file is on your machine. The process of calibration is rather simple, but it must be done in a dark room (iirc, but it's been a long time since I calibrated my CRT, I just set it and forgot it. )

 

[MC Webster]

A couple questions about Adobe Gamma: Will it work on an LCD? I am going through the wizard and it asks me to adjust the brightness and contrast of my screen. The only way I can do that is through the display control panel, is that how I should do it? Will I need to continue to load these brightness and contrast settings after I change them for Adobe Gamma? Thanks for the help!

 

[ProviaFan]

I believe that the Adobe Gamma will work on desktop LCDs, which have brightness controls on them, but I'm not sure about the laptop LCDs. You could try the controls in the display properties, and see if they remain after a reboot (I think they should be persistent, but I'm not sure that they will be).

 

[kgraeme]

ColorSync on the Mac doesn't actually do anything to change the look of the monitor. What it does is embed a profile of your monitor settings into the file. It also has to have a profile of the printer. It then does a conversion of the color in the document on the fly to adjust between the two color profiles.

That's the theory. In practice, I found that calibrating devices and creating profiles and embedding profiles and the whole crapload of it just didn't really work without quite a bit of work. If it actually worked as well as my description above, then it would be great, but in reality I never got a print out of my Apple Color Laser with ColorSync to match my profiled monitor or the final press output.

Adobe Gamma is just a monitor gamma adjuster. It exists on both Mac and PCs and comes with Photoshop. It's intended as a means to "normalize" your monitor's appearance. I say normalize instead of calibrate, since most people can't tell a calibrated display from a ham sandwich. Unless you use something like a Barco hardware calibrator, it's just a duck shoot. With Adobe Gamma, you are changing not only lightness and darknes, but the actual dynamic range and the curve of where the midpoint of color fits on that scale. It may or may not make your monitor closer to your printer.

 

[MC Webster]

Alright then. Thanks guys. Seems I'm back to where I started then...

 

[Mingon]

Try changing to cymk - this changes the screen to show the printers colours and gives a better view of what the pictures will look like. As the monitor is RGB (red green blue) and the printer is cyan yellow magenta and black this is likely to be you problem. <Edit> You have the 5 colour epson (i have the 875dc) this requires another filter I think

 

[MC Webster]

I have the Epson Stylus Photo 870. I don't think it's five colours. It uses the same colour print cartridge as the Photo 785EPX, or Photo 780.

 

[Mingon]

it should have 5 colour and black, look here.