Sorry—this is a first post and it's a question. But I registered because I noticed there are some helpful people here and I need an answer because its driving me nuts!

I'm doing a regular newsletter for a non-profit and my problem is with the colours of the final output—I don't know how to explain it, but they are darker than they should be, or I had hoped them to be.

I'm converting all the images to CMYK—do I need to further adjust them keeping in mind these printers print everything too dark? How do I do this? Should I just guess?

How do you guys do this sort of thing if you can't trust the colour on your monitors? do you have to check every bit of colour, every photo/image against your pantone samples? Or do you just get tons of expensive printer proofs to tweak everything until everything is perfect?

Thanks!