Color management - screen image and printed output mismatch
- From: Sandy Anne <SandyAnne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:31:01 -0700
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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