Digital photos: Part one - Picture perfect

Digital cameras and photo printers have revolutionised photography. Now anyone can take great pictures, edit them on their PC and print them out straight away.

But this is where the trouble starts. The colours visible on a computer screen aren’t always the same as the colours from the printer.

So, the first step, especially if photos are to be edited, is to ensure the monitor is displaying colours accurately. But why aren’t the colours on monitors automatically accurate? The reason is that producing a display that looks good isn’t necessarily the same as making it display colours accurately.

Most monitors come from the factory set to a brilliant, ‘blue’ white that makes documents, web pages and photos look fabulous. If a monitor is adjusted to give truly accurate colours, it will tend to look darker, gloomier and more ‘yellow’. This impression does fade after a few days as the eyes adapt, but the screen is still a little duller.

The danger is that if colours are adjusted to look right on the screen, they may come out wrong in print.

Monitor profiles
Monitor makers understand the difference between the monitor’s colours and the ‘real’ colours; the professional photo industry spends a lot of time and effort making monitors and printers produce accurate colours, a science called gamma correction.

This is done with colour ‘profiles’. A profile adjusts the colour data sent by the computer to the monitor to make it show (or render, in technical terms) colours correctly. Some monitors include colour profiles, which are installed automatically. But colour profiles can be generated manually, as we will demonstrate.

To see how colour profiles are applied, right-click on a blank area of the Desktop and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. This opens the Display Properties dialogue box. Now click the Settings tab and the Advanced button to display the monitor and graphics card settings.

The Color Management tab will display any colour profiles which have been defined for the monitor, and others can be chosen by pressing the Add button. Any profile created with the Adobe Gamma control panel, which we will introduce shortly, will appear here. Windows uses profiles to adjust or correct the data sent to the screen.

If you want to correct the data sent to the screen so it will match what you print out, simply print a photo, compare the print to the image on screen, and use the monitor’s menus to adjust the brightness, contrast and colour to match the print.

The printer’s colours might not be completely accurate, though photo printers do generally produce pretty accurate colours on the maker’s own paper and with the correct settings.