Hands on: Prepare to print your photos

If you suspect your monitor profile to be the source of colour problems consider buying a hardware profiler. These devices consist of a spectrophotometer, which attaches to the screen, and software which analyses the screen output to produce an ICC profile for your specific display.

Pantone’s Huey monitor calibration device marks a departure from conventional calibration hardware in that, as well as measuring screen output, it also measures the ambient light in the room and adjusts the monitor settings accordingly.

The £74.95 price tag puts it well within the reach of hobbyist photographers and those for whom accurate colour is important, but not a matter of professional necessity. See the useful links box for details of where to get it.

The soft option
It’s a common misconception that colour management involves getting your printer to reproduce exactly what you see on your screen. It’s physically incapable of doing this because the two devices use different physical systems to display colour, and your monitor can display many more colours than your printer can print.

The solution is soft proofing, which involves using colour management to make your monitor emulate the colour characteristics of your printer. The monitor shows you what the printer is capable of, not the other way around. The more advanced photo-editing applications, including Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, can show you a soft proof before you commit to ink and paper.

Ambient light
Pantone’s Huey monitor calibration device can sense and adjust for the changing quality of ambient light, but whether you use one of these devices or not, you need to be aware of the effect of ambient light on, well, everything you look at.

The presence of strong lighting or colours close to your monitor – room lighting, even clothing – can affect the appearance of on-screen colours. And a print viewed under artificial room lighting will look very different if you take it outside into the daylight.

Before you start adjusting monitor and printer settings, take a second to consider whether the ambient lighting conditions are the cause of your problems and choose a neutral desktop colour (white, black, or grey) for viewing photos. If you can’t bear to be without your rainbow desktop, use your photo editor’s full screen or sideshow mode.

Get the right ink
Experimenting with unbranded third-party inks has led me to one conclusion – if you want to get good-quality, accurate and consistent results from your printer, use the manufacturer’s ink cartridges. The only exception to this is high-quality specialist inks from companies such as Lyson.

These have a proven quality record and are supplied with their own ICC colour profiles so you’ll be able to use them in your colour-managed printing workflow.

Choosing your paper
As with ink, I’d recommend that, for most purposes, you stick with paper produced by your printer manufacturer. The most compelling argument for this is colour management.

First, it’s necessary to understand that there’s no such thing as a printer profile – the profile supplied by printer manufacturers is for a printer model using a specific paper and ink combination. The profile for my Epson R800 works with Epson inks and Epson premium glossy photo paper.

If I use any other paper the profile won’t be correct and the results will be unpredictable. It used to be difficult to get hold of profiles for anything other than the manufacturer’s recommended ink/ paper combination but, increasingly, paper manufacturers are providing profiles for their products on a variety of printers.