If you're not satisfied with the what you see when you print, there are fixes you can make such as setting color profiles.Printing photos has changed dramatically since the days when getting acceptable color took a great deal of knowledge or even more luck. Today, you can pick almost any printer, camera, and scanner at random and use them together without a problem. If you have a well-trained eye, you might quibble with the color, but most people are usually satisfied with it.
For those who aren't, the fixes run the gamut, from simple steps that anyone who prints photos should know about to complex tools of interest only to professionals and the most demanding photo enthusiasts. We'll focus on the simple fixes here and take a look at the advanced tools in the sidebar "Color Calibration Tools."
Why Color Needs Managing
Colors are harder to match than you might expect, for a number of reasons. A major challenge in printing from a computer is translating color information from one device to another. Two printers that use different cartridges almost always use significantly different colors for each primary: cyan, yellow, and magenta. If you define a color in terms of the inks in the printer—say, 20 percent cyan, 45 percent yellow, and 35 percent magenta—the color you get will depend on the printer you're using. This same problem applies to cameras, scanners, and monitors.
One way to deal with this is to create a color profile for each device and use a color management scheme to adjust colors based on the profiles. But individual profiles mean separate profiles for every possible variation, including every change in resolution or paper. Worse, to get the colors right, you'd need to adjust the profiles every time you changed ink cartridges, since the new ink could be from a different dye lot.
A simpler approach is to agree on a standard way to describe colors and let manufacturers worry about how to translate between the standard and each of their printers, scanners, and cameras. That way, you shouldn't have to worry about color management, or even be aware of it.
Read the full story on PCMagazine.com: Getting Your Color Right
