It is very important to have a properly calibrated and profiled monitor to insure that the colors on your monitor match the colors in the prints you receive from WHCC.
The easiest, most efficient and most accurate way to calibrate and profile your monitor is with a hardware monitor calibration device. We use and recommend the i1Display 2 by Xrite.
This device actually attaches to the front of your monitor and reads color patches displayed by the software. Using these readings, the software removes any color cast from your screen, helps optimize the brightness/contrast/color output and creates a profile describing how your monitor displays color. Photoshop then uses this profile when displaying images to give you the most accurate color display possible.
We strongly recommend the purchase of a hardware calibration device. It is an investment of a couple hundred dollars, but it is the only way to get the best monitor to print match.
You can find more information on these devices along with purchase information at: i1Display 2: www.xritephoto.com
When calibrating your monitor, set your target Whitepoint and Gamma curve to 6500k and Gamma 2.2. These, however, are only recommendations; you may find that your viewing environment has warmer lights, in which case you could experiment with a Whitepoint of 5000k.
Calibrating your monitor is the first step in receiving the best monitor to print match. The second step is to embed a valid ICC profile into each file you send to WHCC. Without this profile, we do not know what colorspace your files are in. Most photographers use either sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998) as a working colorspace.
Follow the directions below to properly setup your Photoshop Color Settings.
For Photoshop:
Whenever you open a file that is saved and tagged in a color space other than your working space, Photoshop will prompt you to convert to the working color space. If you would rather have Photoshop do this automatically for every file, you can uncheck the “Ask When Opening” box next to Missing Profiles. Photoshop will then assume every file not tagged with a color space is in your working space.
When you save your JPEGs out of Photoshop, make sure to check the “Embed Color Profile” checkbox in the Save dialog box. Without this checked, we do not know the colorspace of your files, and you will have unpredictable color in your prints.