Hands on: Effective colour management

Often the reason printed photos fail to match what you see on screen is that the viewing conditions are not ideal.

The Colour Management Check-up Kit includes an image with an ingenious strip called a GATF/RHEM light indicator. If the light by which you are viewing the prints isn’t reasonably close to the colour temperature of daylight (5,500K), vertical stripes are visible in the strip. Only when the stripes disappear can you be sure that any mismatch is due to colour management problems.

Print and be damned
Half a colour management system is as much use as none at all, and the next step is to get hold of an accurate profile for your printer and ink/paper combination.

If you are currently using a generic profile supplied by the printer manufacturer, the first thing to do is ensure you are using the correct inks and paper.

If you are using ink and/or paper from another manufacturer, you’ll need the right profiles and you might be able to obtain them from the manufacturer’s website.

For example, Kodak provides profiles for its Professional Inkjet Photo Paper for use with a number of popular printers. It’s worth checking before you buy paper or third-party ink that profiles are available for your printer. Without one the chances of getting good, or at any rate accurate, results are slim.

Even if you do source a profile for your choice of ink and paper, it’s subject to the same caveats as any generic profile. The characteristics of individual printers, ink and paper batches can vary. If you are still having problems, your only solution may be to produce a custom printer profile.

Although you can buy devices that measure printer output and enable you to produce a custom profile, they are complicated to use and costly.

There are, however, companies that provide profiling services. They can either send you – or you can download from their website – a test pack that consists of calibrated test charts which you print on your printer.

You then send the printouts to the company for analysis using a spectrophotometer – a measuring device similar to the monitor calibration hardware already mentioned. The data is then analysed and a custom profile is emailed to you.

Epson provides such a service for its range of inkjet printers. It costs £100 per profile, which may sound expensive but is slightly less than the cost of replacing all the ink cartridges in my Stylus R800.

These profiles only work with the Epson printer driver. If you’re using a Rip (Raster Image Processor) you’ll need the on-site service which, at £850 per day, is aimed at colour output bureaux.

There are other independent colour consultants that offer similar profile by mail services, some of which we've mentioned. Or simply type ‘inkjet printer custom ICC profile’ into a search engine for more options.

Soft proofing
Implementing a colour-managed workflow won’t guarantee that your printed output will match what’s on screen. The physical differences in the way the two systems represent colour – one uses transmitted light and the other reflects it – make it impossible.

Your monitor can, however, show you how something will look when it is printed. This is called soft proofing.

Many photo-editing apps, including Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, will allow you to soft proof. In Paint Shop Pro X, select Color Management from the File menu and check the Proofing radio button.

Select your monitor and printer profiles from the pulldown menu on the left and ‘Match’ from the ‘Rendering intent’ pulldown menu on the right, then click OK.

Useful links
http://shop.colourconfidence.com
Online shop for Pantone Colorvision Colorplus. Shop also sells more advanced Spyder colorimeter and printer profiling products, and Kodak Colour Management Check-up Kit.

wwwuk.kodak.com/global/en/professional/products/papers/inkjet/main.jhtml?i d=0.1.22.16.3.20&lc=en
ICC profiles for printers using Kodak Professional inkjet photo paper.

www.lyson.com/Technical%20Support/ICCPC.html
ICC profiles for popular printers using Lyson inks and papers.

www.pixl.dk/index.htm
Online profiling service for all devices.

www.chromix.com
Colorvalet profiling for all devices. Printer profiles cost $99 each.

www.gretagmacbeth.com
Eye-One Display 2 monitor profiler and other profiling products.

www.epson.co.uk/support/icc_profiling/index.htm
Online profiling service for Epson printers. Profiles cost £100 each.