| Joined: | Mon Apr 9th, 2012 |
| Location: | Adelaide, Australia |
| Posts: | 187 |
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As a result Apple screens are usually good and well calibrated out of the box
However, being LED, Apple iMac screens are often over-bright and the earlier glossy iMacs notoriously difficult to profile
Profiling (using a dedicated device like a Spyder) enables the display to most closely display the true colours, brightness, contrast and shadow detail of the file/image being viewed
Even then, in my experience the shadow detail and brightness will never be really close to how that image might look in print, and many affordable screens (even after profiling) will look worse than an out of the box iMac
Screens from Eizo and NEC will allow all aspects of the image to be displayed properly and cheaper screens aimed at photographers (like those from Dell) may also produce good results, but vary quite a bit in their quality
As it is I don't profile my iMac and I get good (though bright) results on screen
Then, when I print, I either export my files and take to a lab OR I print locally using Lightroom (I find it almost impossible to stuff up printing from LR. Other programs offer too much choice and complexity - I'm looking at you Photoshop)
The most common problem with printing from the iMac seems to be dark prints which result from images displaying with a lot of brightness on the iMac.
Users will fail to brighten underexposed images AND darken well exposed images in response to this over-brightening
To deal with this complaint users often adjust their images so that they look too bright on screen to get the printed result that they require.
With LR4 Adobe have provided a brightness slider that will allow Lightroom's printing system to compensate for this issue of images needing to look wrong on screen in order to print properly)
Look for 'Print Adjustment' which offers 'brightness' and 'contrast' sliders
(keep in mind you MUST still use colour management when printing if you wish to obtain consistent results and save ink & paper - in my case I have had good results with canned profiles from Ilford, Epson and Hahnem¼hle)
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