One of the great things about Colour Management is that inside the appropriate applications, (e.g. Adobe Photoshop at v6 or later, and others) is the concept of the ‘soft proof’. Soft-Proofing is the ability to see on-screen a representation of what the print will look like on paper.

Before it can do this with any chance of it being correct, you must have a calibrated and profiled screen, and your printer must have been profiled in a similar manner. See our other articles in our Colour Management Info for more details.

How can it do that?

By you telling it what printer profile you will use. In the View | Proof Setup | Custom... menu you have a variety of controls to choose a profile, and define ‘how you will be printing it’, and also how you will view this preview. For example, you can select the profile for your printer / ink / media combination, and see that representation of how it will print, using that profile, and that setup of printer / ink / media!

Now the best resource for help on the Soft-proof setup is the PhotoShop documentation, but the rough summary is that you select the profile that represents the printer / ink / media combination that you will print with. Most photographers will find that the Perceptual rendering intent is best for them... but many will be confused by the Paper White or Ink Black check-boxes. These try to represent on-screen the colour of the paper, and depth of the black, but mostly the results are not very helpful.

Now, having selected ‘OK’ you should be previewing a representation of the image as it will print.

But of course it could never be quite that simple.

Some people find that this preview does not help them visualise how the print will look; they can print the image on the right paper and with all the right settings, (and everything profiled correctly, of course) and still not ‘see’ the correlation between screen and print. Next we discuss briefly why this might be, and then suggest an approach that might work for you (possibly even in a non-colour-managed environment).

Why is Screen to Print Matching Imperfect?

Screen to print matching is imperfect precisely because the two output methods we are considering, Monitor and Print, tend to have very different colour spaces. The screen is RGB additive colour, and an emitter of light, a print, typically CMYK and a reflector of light. The screen has no texture, papers used for prints often do. Therefore the strong colours on screen tend to be Red, Greens and Blues... on the print, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. So, for Photoshop or similarly colour managed application to show us this preview, it has to convert the colour space of our image from it’s colour space (say, Adobe RGB 1998 or sRGB) to the printer colour space, and then convert that to the screen space, and each time a conversion occurs, the rendering intent will effect how out-of-gamut colours get changed and compressed into a possibly smaller colour space.

Therefore, we need some method to help us identify which colours on-screen are which colours in print, and therefore, how our print will actually appear.

Consider a roughly equivalent photographic situation; you have captured a scene on transparency / slide film, and are able to view the same side-by side. You may see immediately that the slide film has changed the colour balance of the scene somewhat; you look at the slide, and see a vivid blue sky - you look to the sky and see something apparently less blue! But, you may consider this slide an accurate representation of what was there at that time. Now consider what would happen if the slide was projected and photographed on negative film, then printed... you can now have the scene next to the slide next to the print. The print would likely have an entirely different colour balance to it, due to the characteristics of the film and the development chemicals and paper used and so on. These changes in colour loosely equate to the conditions that we are considering with respect to colour-space conversions! Now consider a slide photo being taken of the photo print from the negative. This would be loosely similar to seeing an on-screen preview, of something that would be output on another device.

A Strategy for Screen to Print Matching

Some people will quickly learn the skills necessary to see the soft-proof on-screen, and visualise the print. Others will need some extra assistance.

To help you match screen to print, we suggest that for each printer profile you use (meaning each printer / paper / ink combination) you have a test print made with that profile. Ideally, the test print will show many colours, many lighting conditions, and so forth - one example of this is the PhotoDisc target included on the CD-ROM with some ColorVision products. If you print this file with every profile you have (again, assuming the correct printer / ink / paper combination!) then you will have an excellent tool for viewing on-screen what will be printed, and comparing.

So, your procedure for visualising the print of an image will be as follows:

1. Load the target file you have chosen and have as a print on the chosen paper, and use soft-proof to see that image in the ‘printer space’;
2. Have your physical print to hand next to the screen;
3. Load the image you are working on, and again set the soft-proof to be the same settings as you set in (1) above;
4. You now have two images on-screen, your test target file, and your image to be printed. You should be able to draw comparisons between the two images in that one may be warmer than the other, one ‘red’ area may be like another, and so on;
5. You can now look at those same areas on the test print that you have. You will be able to draw similar conclusions for the printed end-result as you did with the screen; if your image is more magenta in an area than the test image on-screen, then the print is likely to be more magenta than the test target print on paper! As you avert your gaze from screen to print and vice versa, you may need to blink and adjust your vision to assist you.
6. With careful adjustments, and correct use of the controls, when you finally print your image, you will be able to see the difference on-screen, see the equivalent difference on the prints... and this will be a useful part of the learning exercise;
7. Ideally, you will have a viewing booth with a carefully controlled light source in which to view your prints. Additionally, the booth should have a dimmable light source so that you can get a better screen to print match in terms of the brightness of the print in relation to the screen. However, only the most high-end users have such things; and this approach may help you gain results where otherwise you can not see similarities... that are actually there.

We hope that you find this suggestion useful

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.