Getting Photoshop vs ACDSee vs Colour laser calibration

[g__day (Matthew)]

Two questions - both about colour / intensity calibration I guess.

Qu. 1 - Calibrating Photoshop CS2 vs ACDSee (a simpler JPG viewer)

When I finish processing shots in Photoshop CS2 - things look okay, I may save them in JPGs, but when I open and view them in ACDSee the dark (almost black) sky background looks too bright - like the dark point has been very discernibly shifted. Open the JPG in Photoshop and it still looks good, but ACDSee shows a different result. What is causing this and more importantly how do I avoid / minimise it occurring?

Qu. 2 - Calibrating Photoshop CS2 vs a HP Colour Laser Printer

The shots look nowhere near as good laser printed at 600 DPI (on plain paper) as on the screen. Dark point is wrong, red tones are far muted as examples of what is wrong. What is the best way to calibrate your screen / colour palette or what ever is causing this so that on the screen I can show a very close approximation of what a colour print will look like?

Many thanks!

Matthew

[jase (Jason)]

In PS, are you soft proofing? You'll find that proofing against monitor RGB (calibrated profile) will deliver an accurate result. In ACDSee, you can also use the calibrated profile - go to Tools | Options | Colour Management (input/output profiles). Keep in mind that Web Browsers don't understand colour management, hence the default system profile is used. I also regularly proof on another system for validation. For prints, I always do hard proofs as I find it hard to judge what the RIP is going to do to the images. Sometimes subtle boosts in a certain hue is required to deliver the desired accuracy. Depends on how critical you want to be.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Jase,

Thanks for the reply. No PS is pretty new to me, I don't do soft proofing (nor know what it is). And ACDSee (Sheepish) last version I bought was 3.1 - didn't have colour management in the tool options (maybe I should get the latest version).

One thing I found did help printing - was to get PS to manage the print colours. The black looks closer to displayed black - rather than murky reddy brown - however many faint stars disappear - which to me suggests colour profiling is way off somewhere.

I will look up profing and profiles in PS help - thanks!

Matthew