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Warm prints after monitor re-calibration?

Geoff Smith

New member
About 2-3 months ago I started working with a fine art photographer doing retouching and file prep for her. For exhibition prints, we found a (mostly) self-service bureau that we liked (primarily because of favorable rates to make prints on their 30" wide Chromira). We agreed to both calibrate our monitors to their specs (6000K, gamma ~2.0-2.1, ~100 cd/m2) and have been getting very nice, neutral prints that match from our individual monitors at home to their workstation monitors to prints in their viewing booths, which is great (prior to this, my monitor was at 6500K & 2.2 gamma and a similar brightness).

At home where I print on an Epson R2400, however, my own prints now come out with a marked warm/red push, with noticeable pink/magenta in the highlights. I print with a profile (from Digital Dog) on Epson Premium Semimatte. Prior to calibrating my monitor to the service bureau's specs, I was getting great results in terms of neutrality and color matching. Now everything is weirdly warm. When I soft-proof in Photoshop, the monitor image is a pretty good match for the print in terms of luminance (or close at least considering how different a monitor image is to look at vs. a print) and overall looks good on-screen, but in a print the yellows are swung towards red and highlights towards pink/magenta.

Basically, I'm wondering if re-calibrating my monitor means I need to re-profile the paper/printer combination. I don't see how this is possible, since the profile targets were printed without any intervention by the operating system, Photoshop and as little as possible from the printer (i.e. color management turned off in the printer and everywhere else). I'm on a Mac if that makes any difference. Has anyone else seen behavior like this and what did you do about it? Thanks for any help anyone can provide!

Best,
--Geoff
 
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