Hands on: Prepare to print your photos

Despite the huge advances made in colour printing technology in the last few years, the apparently straightforward task of producing a good-quality, reasonably accurate colour print from a digital photo continues to elude many people.

You only have to look at the success of online and high street print labs to know this is the case. If it was easy to produce inexpensive prints at home, more people would. As it is, the already high cost of consumables is further inflated due to the amount of waste involved in the numerous attempts necessary to get an adequate result.

What goes wrong?
One of the most common reasons for poor results is an incorrect colour-management setup or the complete lack of one. A lot of people fight shy of colour management because they think it’s complicated and difficult to set up correctly.

The bad news is that they’re not far wrong, but in the absence of a colour management system your chances of producing acceptable prints are slim, and things are improving when it comes to ease of use. It’s now relatively easy to assign ICC profiles to your monitor and other devices in Windows XP and Vista, and an increasing number of photo-editing applications are colour-management aware.

If you follow the advice given here and still can’t get good results, the problem is most likely some specific aspect of your colour management or printer driver setup.

Colour management
You should have ICC profiles installed for at least your monitor and printer/paper combination. These are supplied with the device, or you can download them from the manufacturer’s website. You’ll find Windows XP and Vista profiles in Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color.

To install a monitor profile, open the Display Properties Control Panel, click the advanced button on the Settings tab and select the Colour Management tab.

Monitor calibration
‘Canned’ profiles are produced from an individual monitor, but specific models may vary in their colour characteristics. You can minimise the differences by using the factory default settings for brightness, contrast, colour temperature and any other available adjustable settings.