Calibrate Your Display Screen To Get The Most From Your Printer

The use of a custom ICC profile with your printer is one of the smartest steps you could take to enrich your digital printing workflow, especially if you are a professional photographer - or maybe just an enthusiast who values the importance of obtaining the most precise color possible from your printer. But getting accurately printed color goes hand-in-hand with seeing accurate color on your display monitor. Before it is possible to experience the full power of successfully utilizing a profile for your printer, you should calibrate and profile your display monitor. You can print perfectly true color from your printer with great consistency, but it is not going to appear precise to you as long as you persist in using a display which has not been precisely calibrated and profiled.

A monitor profile will allow ICC-aware software programs - like Photoshop - to accurately present your image's color. To achieve an identical appearance in print, the existing color data has to be translated into the acceptable output values for your printer, and whatever combination of paper and ink you decide to use. The function of your printer profile is to accurately translate the appearance of ink that is laid down on the page. Canned or generic profiles from printer or paper manufacturers may produce mostly reasonable results, but they may not consistently and accurately represent the behavior of your specific output device. I am a powerful proponent of getting rid of those canned profiles in favor of utilizing a custom printer profile instead. In my opinion, the appropriate implementation of a custom printer profile into your digital printing workflow is an essential step in matching your display screen with your printed output.

Usually, your display is capable of reproducing a larger range of colors (wider gamut) than your printer. This fact is becoming even more true today, aided by the rapid transition from older CRT monitors to state-of-the-art LCD displays. As a result, it is just about impossible to adjust a printed image to look like your display; but rather, we work to make your display look like the print instead. Achieving this involves sending the image through the printer profile, and back through the monitor profile, so you will see an emulation of your printed image on your computer's display. This is generally known as "soft proofing. This functionality is available within a number of favorite third-party applications, like Photoshop, Qimage, Aperture, and others. Pretty neat! Soft proofing makes it possible for you to simulate your printer's output and helps you to achieve the most precise display to printer color matching.

Calibrating your monitor is possibly the easiest and least expensive part of developing a strong color-managed workflow. If you haven't done this step already, it is something you should do either before - or at the same time as - profiling your printer. Using a printer profile is a waste of time if you lack the capability to match your monitor's output to your printer. You can find some very good monitor calibration tools and software packages available online. Here are just a few: Spyder3 by DataColor (different versions and price levels), also various versions of Pantone Huey, and X-Rites i1 (Eye-One) Display software. All of these systems include a precision colorimeter device for accurate monitor calibrations, and software that will help you create a custom monitor profile. The software packages listed here are major players in this niche, and all provide very good results at a reasonable price. But there certainly are others you may want to look into. All of these systems provide detailed information about the display settings you will need to use in order to view images on your monitor with unyielding color accuracy.