PCPhoto

Match-Making

Get your monitor to accurately portray the colors of your digital photos

By Ibarionex R. Perello

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Match-Making

I was thrilled when I bought my first inkjet printer and couldn’t wait to make my first color print. After spending about half an hour perfecting the portrait photograph in Photoshop, I sent the image to the printer and was immediately disappointed. If the person had been a visiting extraterrestrial or suffering from jaundice, the yellowish skin tone might have been acceptable. Neither was the case. I was just another photographer experiencing the frustration of having an inkjet print that didn’t match what was on the monitor.

Color Gamut

After I got over the desire to drop-kick my entire system, I learned it wasn’t a problem with the printer or even the monitor. What I discovered was that each device (monitor, scanner, printer) sees and interprets color differently. Just like the colors of an image would look different if viewed as a print versus a slide, each of these devices produces color in its own unique way. The trick to solving this problem was to find the means to get them all to speak the same language.

The way to do this was by calibrating the devices—creating specific profiles and using them to maintain a color-accurate workflow.

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