[Rob Barron]

One thing worth taking into account is your monitor and graphics card as these two things are the definers of all the colour you see in your pictures on-screen.

I had no end of problems trying to get my monitor to look something similar to the prints my i9950 were producing all to no avail. That was a 19" CRT monitor. Recently I got rid of that and bought a DellWFP2007 20.1" LCD monitor and wow, what a difference! I can now see everything in the picture, even in the near black areas. But most importantly, what I see on my screen is a lot closer to what comes out of my printer.

It is well worth getting a proper Printer Profile made to ensure the inks and papers you are using produce the results your screen is showing. After all, I can print exactly the same image on two different papers and get MASSIVELY different results.

All webmasters know that when producing graphics for the internet, they should use a palette of 'web-safe colours'. That means forgoing the pleasures of 16.7 million colours and restricting themselves to the basic range that the interent can reproduce accurately. A lot of people are not aware of it but when you use 'Save for web' that is precisely what is happening: the colours used in the picture are adjusted to their nearest web-safe equivalent. This means the number of colours in the shot are reduced massively, the filesize goes down.... and subtle shading often disappears with it :o)

As mentioned, calibration is a huge subject and some people pay inordinate sums of money for tools to do the job.... with varying degrees of success! If you need absolute accuracy then money needs to be spent: if however you are happy with a close equivalent, no big deal. Obviously the use you are putting your results to makes a big difference. If the shots are for a client paying heap big sums of cash then they might be expecting colours to match provided swatches.

My answers here haven't really answered anything, sorry. But if it makes you feel better, we all suffer the problem to some degree and due to the spactral nature of red, that will always be the one that drives us nuts!

Cheers,
Rob