Print Your Photos

Print your Digital Photos With Color Accuracy

or How to Print What you See on Your Monitor

Did you buy a nice photo printer but got discouraged by photos printing with a color cast or just strange, unexpected colors? So now you just take your memory card to Walmart or Target and take what they give you? Your camera shoots in 8” x 12” format but they only print 8 x 10? You can get control of the process and print your photos the way you want. A while back I thought of writing and posting this as a single article. But it is somewhat complex and began to get quite long. So I decided to break it down and post a step a week.

A little background to understand digital printing. Everything in the digital world is 1's and 0's. So here is a little bit of digital talk: 01001100001010100010101010. Now I have no idea what I just said but it means something to your computer. So if your computer just crashed I probably insulted its mother! The point is that every color, every pixel and dot is described by some code like that. Also every device you use - camera, scanner, computer, monitor, printer - may have a slightly different code for the same color. The next thing to know is that every color displayed on your monitor is made up of mixes of just three colors of light - red, green and blue (RGB). And every color you print is made up of four colors of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Right from the beginning you can see two problem areas - different codes, different base colors!

The first step in printing the colors you want is a monitor that is displaying colors accurately. Monitors do not come from the factory accurately adjusted to standardized color settings. But any good monitor will allow you to make those adjustments. (Here is a caveat, most laptop and iMac displays don't have individual color controls. You could plug in an external monitor for accurate color work.) For color accuracy the monitor you use for preparing your photos must be calibrated to ICC (International Color Consortium) standards. Hardware calibration is the most accurate and can be done with a colorimeter which reads the strength of each color channel: Red, Green, & Blue. Or a spectrophotometer which reads the strength of colors at many points on the color spectrum beside Red, Green & Blue. If these are not available, software calibration can be done. Just be aware that, because of the way our brains process color, software calibration is more subjective. On Macintosh computers ColorSync is built into the monitor control panel, on Microsoft Windows systems Windows Image Color Management (ICM) 2.0 should be in the control panels; on Mac OS and Microsoft Windows systems if you are using an Adobe product such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, Adobe Gamma should also have been installed in your Control Panels.

Color phosphors do wear and dim over time and not evenly so calibration should be done on a regular schedule. Once a week, once a month, every other month, etc. depending on how heavily you use your computer and how fussy you are. OK, now your computer and monitor are thinking of the same color.


Some colorimeters: X-Rite®: Huey® on the low end $90, i1 Display® $176; Datacolor®: The Spyder® series of colorimeters from $90 to $250, etc.
Some spectrophotometers: X-Rite®: ColorMonki® $500, i1Basic® $1000, i1XTreme® $1500, MonacoPROFILER® $2000; Datacolor® SpyderSR® series from $340 to $600.

Next post: Printers & Papers.