Calibrating monitor for PP and printing

[Vexed Mind]

I'm not sure if this is exactly where this post belongs, but it was the best I found. I bought a new laptop and am wondering how I should calibrate the screen so my prints will come out as I see them. I'm going to change to printing with WHCC, and I think they have it set up with a profile to match my calibration and such, but I still want to make sure I'm seeing true colors. Also, it's an LED, not sure how different they are than the LCDs I've had. On both my lappy and my desktop I've felt like I need to turn up the brightness pretty much all the way, and I -have- had prints come out much darker than I saw them.

Thanks in advance for any info on this.

EDIT: Ok, I just found another post on this, sorry I didn't find it before I made this one. I'll look into some software to help out, and see about WHCC getting me their color profile (I know they do that). I still wonder about the brightness though. Any thoughts on that? My monitors just seem so dim unless it's turned up all the way.. I assume that will probably cause my prints to come out too dark, even if the colors are calibrated correctly? Is there a way to set a proper brightness level?

[teaking]

From your post it sounds like your monitor is too bright then, if your prints are darker than on your monitor.

It is advised not to use laptop screens for calibration as the angel of view changes brightness of images. But if its all you have there are things you can do.

One is to look through google at "colour management", and "coloour managed work flows" as that is what you need to achieve there are webpages with colour charts to enable you to change your graphics cards settings for brightness, contrast, gamma etc to get closer to a calibrated display. Hardware calibrators are usualy better but not free.

As for the profiles from your print company they are their printers colour profiles and will be used for "softproofing" which is another thing you will need to read your editing softwares manual to find out how to do once your monitor is calibrated.