Graphic designers, photographers, videographers, publishers and PC users at large: all of them rely on their digital equipment being capable of rendering colors right. But the depressing reality is your colors will differ depending on the output machine. A monitor’s red isn't the same as an inkjet printer’s red. Besides, what's “red”?
Here are 10 things you can do to make sure red is red, whichever device has to render it.
1. Buy a good monitor. OK, this is an open door, but by “good” i mean a monitor that you can calibrate. That rules out all of the office monitors, the Apple Theatres and leaves you with LaCie 300 range and Eizo ColorEdge products.
2. Purchase a good calibration and profiling application. It's easy to get software that comes with a fine quality GretagMacbeth Display 2 colorimeter (called the “Squid 2″ by Color Solutions), and has a feature called “software calibration”. The latter calibrates any monitor by storing the calibration info (the Tone Response Curve) in the video card’s look up tables. The sole requirement: your video card should support it. ATI’s Radeon range supports this.
3. Calibrate and create a color profile for your monitor once a month. Calibration isn't like profiling. Calibration means the color look bup tables in the monitor are put into a known state, while a profile just describes the monitor’s perception of colours. With calibration you tell the monitor that it must render “pure red” by setting its color channels in a particular way. The profile you create will tell your image editing software, or design application that pure red for this monitor means a specific mixture of its colour channels.
4. Buy an inkjet printer that has non-clogging print heads. Ideally, print heads shouldn't ever clog. If they do, you can rest assured your colors will come out nasty. If they do not, you can still have bad colours, but now at the least you can something about it. Good printers are rather more costly than the bottom-price inkjet printers you can buy these days. Think about paying something like 200 Dollars at a minimum. For top-notch printers like the HP Photosmart Pro B9180, expect to pay 700 USD.
5. Drive your inkjet through a Raster Image Processor. Many top of the range printers support a RIP, although not all RIPs are born equal. EFI makes good RIPs, as do the sellers that develop costlier RIPs for large format printers. EFI has a fair RIP, with support for ink limiting, black start setting, etc, for an exceedingly decent price. It is the EFI Designer Edition.
6. Profile your printer and use that profile with your RIP to get correct colors, and save money on ink consumption. Through the profile settings, you can figure out how much ink gets sprayed onto the page. For some paper types, you can save a large amount of cash by setting ink limiting to it’s perfect level for your printer.
7. Use established equipment like X-Rite/GretagMacbeth or Barbieri to generate your CMYK printer profile. You must create a profile for each paper not supported by your printer manufacturer. If you must use your printer in RGB mode, you can do with more cost-effective profiling systems. The simplest way to guarantee a top quality profile is formed when you don't have the budget to buy a system that costs a few thousand greenbacks, is to try and appeal to a remote service like Thinck.com’s.
8. Use an image editing application such as Photoshop, which has a “softproof” feature. To softproof means you will be able to visually decide an image’s colors on-screen with enough accuracy to be confident the colours will match the made public output. Softproofing is never one to one, but can come very close, and is an alternative way of saving money by saving on both wasted paper and ink.
8. When revising your image, set the grey balance first. Select a neutral grey area in your image (if you took a photo, you'll remember what was grey, and if you do not, there are virtually always objects that must definitely be gray) and set this area as your neutral grey tone. In Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you do this by picking the Levels or Curves tool, selecting the gray eye dropper in the dialogue window, and clicking with this specific tool in the neutral area of your image.
9. If your image has a warm tone to it, e.g. Because it was shot at dusk or with tungsten light and no flash, you can neutralize colour casts rather by choosing an area that is not exactly neutral but more towards the warm tone of the image. So long as the area is greyish by nature, the image will adjust. In an appropriate way.
10. Be cautious with setting Saturation levels too high. If you boost saturation, you are also boosting colour inaccuracies. You can turbo-charge the saturation of your image when you are sure it is colour-accurate.
These and a lot more tips, tricks, and tutorials, but also product reviews and detailed technology and strategy background info is available on IT-Enquirer.com. IT-Enquirer is a web magazine aimed at creative professionals. It contains articles for amateurs all of the way up to specialists in the field.
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