Re: Color management - screen image and printed output mismatch

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Photoshop aside, You actually have two device related problems- Display and
printer.
If the picture is not displayed accurately on the monitor, you don't know
what it should look like when printed.
Normal consumer ink jet/bubble jet printers, by default, usually print a bit
darker than they really should. I never decided if this was due to customer
preference or the mfrs desire to sell more ink.

Anyway. it is generally a good idea to use a reference picture and color
chards/ grayscale charts to generally set the display to something
reasonable.

http://www.cybergrass.com/Articles/color2.html
Shows two such charts

I would list a few others, but my search engines are currently bogged down
in non relevant paying web sites.


"Sandy Anne" <SandyAnne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:23A545B1-FE3C-436E-8DDF-FCE001E3B275@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have Windows XO Pro as my OS and I use Photoshop 3 and Publisher 98 now
and
again for domestic projects. I also like to use colour sometimes in Word
and
Excel documents.

Like probably 95% of the rest of you I get a mismatch between the colours
I
see on the monitor screen and colours as printed.

Up till now I've just accepted it as one of those things but, having
decided
after 8 years of intermitent use that it might be a good idea to work
through
the Photoshop tutorial :-7 I've come across the notions of monitor
calibration and colour (or even color) management and I realise it doesn't
(necessarily) have to be like that. The problem is, I don't understand
whether my mid-range and rather old set up CAN be improved and I certainly
don't understand, from what I've read, how to go about it even if it were
possible.

I've come across a lot of highly technical jargon. I can see that for
someone who manipulates images and/or does printing professionally it's
worthwhile learning what the terms mean and shelling out for
densitometers,
spectographs and whathaveyou to get it as right as possible. I'm not in
that
league, I just would like to bring the two closer together so I'm not
disappointed when I print a document.

I tried the test document for CMYK which comes with Photoshop (and which
is
used in their calibration tuorial) and I made a test card on Publisher for
RGB pure amd mixed colours. Leaving aside the Photoshop image (which had
a
pinky/orangey cast when I printed it), all the test blocks of colours on
both
proofs print the same (I mean CMYK cyan prints the same colour as RGB
green/blue and so on) but:

(1) neither set looks the same as its screen image apart from both yellows
(CMYK 100 yellow; RGB 255 red/255green). The reds (CMYK 100 magenta/100
yellow; RGB 255 red) are not too bad but all the others are different -
the
RGB test colours, pure and mixed, all print duller and darker; the CMYK
pure
test colours print duller and darker; the mixed colours print lighter

(2) I've noticed that, although the six pure and mixed RGB colours print
the
same as the six pure and mixed CMYK colours, when I compare the two test
cards documents on the screen the colours are different - the RGB colours
in
Publisher look much more vibrant than the CMYK colours in Photoshop
(although
when I did an experiment and created test patches in RGB colours in
Photoshop, they looked the same on the screen as the Publisher colours).
Perhaps this is normal.

My monitor is a Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 73 and my printer a (1996!) HP
Deskjet 693c. I don't do enough colour printing to justify buying new
hardware, I'd just like to know if there's any tweaking I can do to
improve
matters.

I understand some of the principles of Photoshop monitor and printing ink
setups but I think that even if I cracked those compensation processes, it
would have no effect for the mismatch in Word; Excel and, more important,
Publisher (which I use much more often), would it?

I've tried going into Display in Control Panel and found that under Color
Management all there is are the choices between is330.icm; kodak_dc.icm
and
sRGB Color Space Profile.icm. To be honest I don't know what was the
default
before I "explored" but it's now set to sRGB Color Space Profile.icm.

Any suggestions?

Thank you
--
SandyAnne, Dublin


.

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