How do you get your print to look like what you see on your computer screen? It can be rather frustrating, after having spent quite a bit of time in Photoshop working on your image in order tomake it look just right, only to have the print come out looking nothing like what you see on your computer screen.
Here are two out of three essential steps that will help you get started down the right path.
The first step is to colour calibrate your monitor with a colourmeter. “What for?”, you might ask, especially if your monitor is new?
Well, each monitor is different. Have you ever walked into an electronics store that has a wall of television/LCD sets all playing the latest Disney movie or photo slideshow? Have you noticed that most of the television/LCD sets have totally different colour renditions of the movie/images that are playing? Why even the ones made by the same manufacturer, sometimes even the same models, can differ from each other. So if that is the case, how do you know what the true colours are? Can you trust that what you are seeing as a colour shift in your photo, after havingspent an hour trying to correct it in Photoshop, is not, but is in fact, a colour shift introduced by your monitor? For example, you might see your image as being too warm, meaning there is too much red in the image. This seems easy enough to fix in Photoshop: just take some red hue out bygoing to the Image > Adjustments > Colour Balance dialogue box. Now the image on your monitor appears to have less of a red colour cast to it, butwhen you print it out it looks green or cyan. So after trying to fix this printer problem, and wasting four or five sheets of photo paper later, you are ready to pull your hair out. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. This is the reason why, before you turn on Photoshop to edit the colours of an image, you must start with the colour calibration ofyour monitor.
This is the first of three essential steps you need to learn to print like a pro, in getting consistent results. And to assist you with this once difficult task, there are many colourimeters on the market. Now that you have a balanced monitor where whites are rendered as whites, grays as grays, and blacks as blacks, you can make image adjustments in Photoshop based on what you see on the screen. And when you are done editing your image, it will now look great on print… or will it?
Unfortunately, this is not always the case, even after calibrating your monitor. Why? Well, simply put, your monitor can show you colours by mixing various amounts of red, green and blue light that you cannot reproduce in exactly the same way with cyan, magenta, and yellow ink, and in addition, have it look the same way on different surfaces of substrates or paper finishes, e.g. matte, glossy, luster. There are many variables with respect to printing on paper that will affect the look of your prints. So, should we even bother to try printing at all? Well, the second essential step in getting those great-looking printed images is to soft-proof your image before you hit the Print command. This step can be done in Photoshop, as well as in the file management programs like Apple Aperture.
The idea behind soft-proofing is to see the image on screen, in soft version, the way it will appear on the type of substrate on which you will be printing. Here is how you can do this in Photoshop:
After getting the image to look the way you like, go to View > Proof Setup and choose theCustom option from the Setup pull-down menu. The following dialogue box will appear:
Go to the pull down tab to the right of the Profile option. Here is where you are going to choose what type of paper substrate you will be printing on: matte, glossy, luster, etc. As soon as you choose the paper ICC profile, you will see a change to your image on screen. Check the option to use Black Point Compensation and to simulate Paper White; this will make your image less saturated and will give you a true representation of what it will look like on the substrate you are printing on.
Notice how the image looks much duller now that you are soft proofing it for the specific output of paper using the specific ICC paper profiles.
Performing soft proofing will give you an accurate impression of what the image will look like when the ink is spread onto the surface type of paper substrate you choose for your printing. If the image does not look good, you can re-tweak the image in Photoshop to look better for that specific print output. So, before you hit Print, you can see problems in your image’s density on the paper you choose to use and decide whetherto change the paper or enhance the colour of the image to fit within the colour gamut of the paper.
Example: The 1st image below is the way the photo looks when editing it on screen; the 2nd image below is the way the image will look when printed on Epson Premium Glossy Paper.
These are just a few of the essentials about colour management that you will learn during the 5 days we spend together in my class at the Niagara School of Imaging, along with many other important tips and techniques.
I am looking forward to seeing everyone!
