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I have a book that looks great in PDF on a screen but the images come out too dark in print.

Most are grayscale.

I was wondering what could be done to make such picture look better in print. Is there anything other than just turning up the brightness? That makes details go away.

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7 hours ago, Jim Slade said:

Most are color. Some are gray. Both types are too dark.

Could it be that your monitor needs to be calibrated?

Try print a colour sample page outside of Affinity for reference

We have a monitor on the office that never matches photo prints regardless of settings

 

 

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Hi Jim!

You say, “Sending it out”. That can mean a lot of different things that will affect the quality of your book.

What is the actual method of printing that will be used to print your book? Color laser, inkjet, offset lithography, something else? How many copies? Have you specified a paper, coated or uncoated? Any special finishing coatings? Have you and the printer discussed the kind of proof that will be provided for sign off prior to going into production?

In the end, you or the printer will need to come to terms about how to optimize your images to best match the production capabilities and parameters. Some printers have a pre-press department that will do this for you, for a price of course.

Affinity Photo and Design V1. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Dell Precision 7710 laptop. Intel Core i7. RAM 32GB. NVIDIA Quadro M4000M.

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Suspect your monitor is too bright. I have mine at 80 cd/m^2 and 5000k for print and that works for me. Idea is to match the white point of the monitor to the white of the paper under whatever viewing conditions you think are likely. There are standards for viewing and printing somewhere. You might have to re edit your images to get the brightness right.

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Below are links to brochures from Benjamin Moore paint. These are PDFs. I have also gone to ACE hardware and grabbed the same printed brochures. I am using these to do a visual comparison of the PDF versions on my monitors to the hard copy printed versions. I am most concerned with the lightest colors not burning out to stark white. My laptop monitor is displaying the lightest colors better than I expected. My desktop monitor is a little too bright. I am just trying to find out if my monitors are somewhere in the ball park. 

The lightest white is:

C - 1%
M - 1%
Y - 2%
K - 0%

So, I am pretty pleased that my laptop is displaying fairly accurately. The project I am working on involves high resolution Laser printing on photographic paper. I'll be putting together some test files to out put prior to any actual printing which is fairly costly. What I am doing now is only a rough test.

https://www.benjaminmoore.com/-/media/sites/benjaminmoore/images/color-card-pdf-landing-page/aura-color-stories-card_us-eng_sp.pdf

https://www.benjaminmoore.com/-/media/sites/benjaminmoore/images/color-card-pdf-landing-page/off-white-collection-color-card-2021-us-eng-sp.pdf

Affinity Photo and Design V1. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Dell Precision 7710 laptop. Intel Core i7. RAM 32GB. NVIDIA Quadro M4000M.

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12 hours ago, Suirdzign said:

I'd be wary of using someone else's artwork to try matching to your own. You don't know what processes it has gone through in prepress/preflight.

 

As I said, it's a rough test but better than nothing. My final product is digital photographic prints of which I have no previous experience. Proofs will need to be produced prior to any final output.

Affinity Photo and Design V1. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Dell Precision 7710 laptop. Intel Core i7. RAM 32GB. NVIDIA Quadro M4000M.

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