Color Management

Color Management - An easy introduction to consistent true colors in capture - edit - print
By Klaus Bjarner

Calibrating your printer

If you have read the first part about profiling you monitor, I am quite sure, that you will agree, it was fairly easy, without having to be an expert in all the technical details.

That is exactly what is so nice about the calibration products from Datacolor. They make color management easy for every day users, without you having to take a degree in color management first.

The process of calibrating your printer is just as easy, but a bit more time consuming. This is because you need to make several profiles, one for each type of paper you use, as the paper has a great influence on the color tint of the print. As standard your printer manufacturer has included different paper types in the printer driver. When printing using this driver, you are restricted to these types of paper. Simplified the driver contains an ICC profile for each of these standard paper types. For the non enthusiastic user it does not matter to be restricted in this way by the printer manufacturer, but for a professional it is catastrophic.

Most photographers like to use a wide variety of papers to find the right expression in the print that suites the image. With the Spyder3Print calibrator Datacolor unleashes your creative energy and right to choose whatever paper you like for your print job.

How do I calibrate my printer?

As mentioned before, you need to create a profile for each type of paper you wish to use. Using the Spyder3Print software you print a sheet of different color patches on the paper you wish to profile. With the Spyder3Print colorimeter you measure each of the printed color patches. The software knows which color was send to the printer for each patch. When measuring the printed patches with the Spyder3Print, it compares what was printed with what was actually sent to the printer. This information is stored in an ICC profile for that particular paper.

This opens up to a wide range of 3rd party inks and papers; boosting your creativity and probably lowering your cost. It also makes great sense to profile your printer even though you use the original ink and paper, since a custom made profile is actually more precise, than the one supplied with your printer.

If you are into fine art Black & White printing, custom printer profiles are essential. Producing a great Black & White print is very challenging, since the printer uses color to produce all the different shades between solid black and pure white. Avoiding color casts is extremely difficult with the supplied profiles from the vendors, but by using the specialized Black & White profiling option in the Spyder3Print, you achieve gallery quality Black & White prints surpassing your wildest dreams.

If you would like to be able to profile your printer as well as your monitor I suggest you take a look at the Spyder3Studio that combines the best monitor calibrator "Spyder3Elite" with the calibrator for print "Spyder3Print" into one package. In addition to getting it all together in a convenient suitcase for storage and transportation you save a great deal of money buying the bundle instead of buying the two products separately.

With both your monitor and printer calibrated, your work flow is now color managed, and you have everything in place to produce beautiful accurate work. The colors you see on your monitor are the exact same colors your camera captured when you pressed the shutter, and the colors on your print are the exact same colors as you saw when you edited the image on your monitor.

In theory everything should be perfect now, but sometimes real life is different from theory. Each device we use has different gamuts. Gamut is the amount of colors the device can produce. In general the gamut of your monitor is bigger than the one of your printer, meaning, that your monitor can display colors that your printer can not produce. At the same time, your monitor and printer produces the colors in two very different ways. Your monitor produces colors by the use of self generated light, but the colors you see on a piece of paper are produced by reflected light. To illustrate, try bringing your notebook into a dark room. You can still see the colors on the screen. Try doing the same with a print, and you can't see any colors.

To give a little more thorough explanation of the gamut and color production differences between devices, let’s start with how colors are produced.

The way televisions and computer monitors create color is by combining the primary colors of light - red, green and blue. Each pixel consists of a red, green and blue sub-pixel. When they are all turned on the pixel displays white, and when they are all off the pixel displays black. In between colors are a result of different sub pixel combinations and values. This phenomenon is called additive color.

Your inkjet printer produces colors in a very different way called subtractive color. A red apple is a good example to explain subtractive colors. The apple really has no color; it has no light energy of its own like your monitor, it merely reflects the wavelengths of white light from the sun or a lamp. It is the reflection that causes us to see red since the apple absorbs most of the other wave-lengths in the light, and there by looks red to the human eye. Below is an illustration of subtractive colors as they appear on white paper.

These two methods are not able to produce the exact same range of colors. With additive colors (like the monitor) we can display a very bright neon green. There is no way, that we can print this color using subtractive colors on our standard inkjet printer. So in our editing we can actually produce non printable colors. But how do we then control how the final print will look?

Now that you have calibrated both your monitor and your printer the operating system knows exactly what can be reproduced on each device (the gamut). By using a technique called soft proof your computer can simulate (and show on your monitor) how your image will look on paper. The soft proof takes into consideration the colors that are out of gamut of the printer and the difference between additive and subtractive colors.

Using soft proof you can adjust your image until it fits what your printer can reproduce. The software can even automatically adjust the colors to fit within the gamut of your printer.

The essence of making soft proofing work is that each device is color calibrated, so the gamuts of the devices have been mapped.

To take advantage of your newly produced ICC profiles for the printer and knowledge about the soft proof function you have to use software that supports color management in the printing process. It is not only enough that the software supports color management. In most cases we also have to tell the software to use it but don't let it confuse you; read on and I'll explain the printing process in detail to you.

Continue reading: Printing using a profile »