Printing Colours Correctly

While it may be relatively easy to make a digital photo look good on your monitor screen, translating this to a printer can be difficult. For starters, your computer monitor may not display colours correctly. If it doesn’t, there’s no guarantee the image you see on the screen will print out with the correct colour balance.

The easiest way to check this is to use the settings in the printer driver and make one print of a favourite digital photo whose colours you are familiar with. Start by opening the folder containing the image in the application bundled with your printer and select the image from the browser window.

Move on to the next step and set the paper size and type.

Finally, choose the layout. Your picture should be positioned on the screen in accordance with the layout you’ve selected. You can adjust the width of the surrounding frame with the slider in the right side toolbar.

Set the number of copies you want and press the Print button. A preview of the page should appear on your monitor, allowing you to check the positioning of the image on the paper.

Compare the print with the picture you see on your computer monitor. If they don’t match, you should be able to adjust the monitor’s colour, brightness and contrast (‘gamma’) settings to provide a reasonably close match.

Remember the brightness range that can be covered by a monitor screen is far greater than the range you can reproduce on paper so on-screen images will always look richer and more dynamic than prints.

Note: Most printer manufacturers will only provide customer support services for customers who print through the software bundled with their printers. So, if you plan to use third-party software, such as Picasa, The GIMP or Photoshop Elements and print directly from the software, you can’t expect help from the printer manufacturer if your prints don’t turn out as you expected.

A way around this potential problem is to use the printer manufacturer’s driver software after you’ve edited the image. Simply click on File > Print in the image editor and select the Preferences button when the printer driver window opens. Make sure the High Speed box is unchecked and the Print Preview box is checked. Then select PhotoEnhance in the Colour Management check box.

More information on printing digital photos can be found in Photo Review’s Printing Digital Photos Pocket Guides.

This is an excerpt from Post Capture Pocket Guide.
Click here for more details on this and other titles in the Pocket Guide series.

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