Tuesday, May 26th, 2009Muted colors. Hey Humzoo, I know there are quite a few photographers out there, so I was hoping someone could help me out. I shot my first wedding this weekend with a Canon Rebel XT. I usually shoot in straight JPG because most of my photos are of the dogs/dinner/nature. Stuff that I don't worry too much about the colors and lighting coming out perfect.
Well, this weekend I shot in RAW, a negative format native to Canon cameras. I've shot in RAW before, but on a limited basis and most of the stuff I did was going straight to web. My problem is that I've tried printing out a few of the photos I've tweaked and cropped but the colors appear very muted. I've got a Canon Pixma 460 and had never had problems printing out photos. If I were to print a JPG from my camera the colors would look perfect.
I am opening the RAW files in Photoshop CS3, editing, then saving as a JPG file, then trying to print. I've also tried doing the "Save for web" option.
I've done some searches around the web and they make mention to color profiles and converting from RAW to sRGB and RGB. I've tried multiple settings, but I haven't found anything that gives me a great print out.
Any help would be much appreciated.
I'll post an example later on tonight.
At this point though the problem is dealing with what you have in front of you, dull JPGs. What I would recommend is creating a Photoshop Action that will boost contrast a little and boost saturation. Then apply that Action to all your photos, saving new versions of them in a folder somewhere (I would save copies in case you mess up, which can happen when batching photos like this).
If you're unfamiliar with Actions, they're awesome. Basically you open a photo, and make sure the Action palette is visible, then create a new Action and hit the Record button. Make some adjustments, then save your image where you want it to go. Close the image, then stop recording your action.
To apply an Action to a group of photos, go to File -> Automate -> Batch. Then choose the Action you want to use, the source folder, and where to save the images (which you can disable if your Action includes the Save As part that you did with your test image).
Anyway, that's the 30-second tutorial. There are a lot of details that you may want to know, but that might help.
Question, why would my photos look fine then on my monitor (note: not calibrated), but muted when printed out?
Another option might be to tweak your print settings rather than the photo. Usually in Print dialogs, there are options to add contrast, boost saturation, etc. These controls are all different, but you might get lucky finding a sweet spot there that would let you skip editing the photos themselves.