DIGITAL CORNER
By Bob Dean
Calibration of your Printing process
Ever wonder why your prints don’t always look like what is on your display? Why do we need to calibrate our equipment to get the color renditions we want? This month we take a look at the whys and the hows of getting better color prints at home on your existing equipment.
To Start with, the processes used by the various pieces of equipment in personal computers differ in the way they handle color reproduction. To begin with let’s look at monitors and printers. This doesn’t even consider scanners! Monitors use an additive RGB (Red-Green-Blue) process to reproduce color. Red, green and blue when added together will produce black. The printing process on the other hand uses the subtractive CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black)) process. Don’t worry about the additive and subtractive terms; they refer to how light waves interact with your visual system.
To get your color printing to match what is on the screen, you need to calibrate both your monitor and your printer. There are a myriad of ways to do both but the real key is to calibrate your monitor before your printer. You can calibrate your monitor visually or mechanically, depending on critical you are with the color prints you’re making. I found a few websites that have links to some really valuable tools for visual calibration. If these work for you, great, if not you will need to invest in some of the hardware/software products available for monitor calibration. I suggest you look at this website to start with visual calibration:
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/colorcalibration/a/cal_monitor.htm
This site some has introductory text and links to some pretty good tools. It also has links to similar sites for printer and scanner calibration. Be warned, once you start on the process it can be captivating. Remember the goal is to get printed images you like, not the absolute maximum calibration settings of your equipment.