“The closer our monitors match in colour and in brightness, the closer we can get your print to look like the image you see on your screen.”
Are you interested in printing with us, or are you printing on your own? Either way, you’ll need to seriously consider calibrating your monitor so you get results you can be proud of seeing on your wall everyday without having that deeper dissatisfying feeling in your gut from having your artwork or photograph not looking exactly how it did on your monitor before you sent it to your printer. In the case where you’re selling prints of your artwork or photographs, you’ll want to be certain that your artistic vision looks the same in print as the original so that you can confidently charge a fair-for-both-parties price which also fairly represents the value of your artwork. Or at least that’s how I personally felt about it when I printed my first too-dark and off-colour image at a printing services company in a nearby city. At first, I blamed the printer since I didn’t know any better and asked for a refund. It was only after educating myself on colour management that I realized that most, if not all the blame was to be seen in the mirror.
All monitors and screens on any viewing devices (except very expensive monitors designed specifically for colour management workflows) are shipped with colour settings set by manufacturers with their own individual criteria for how they want their monitors and screens to look and compare to the competition in retail stores under an array of overhead lighting conditions. These slight differences in colour settings are typically in colour temperature, shifting between cooler and warmer overall tones and also include monitor brightnesses to really make them pop, even in the brightest of conditions. This extra brightness is also a great feature when using these devices in bright light, but will start to cause problems for you when you start sending image files you’ve edited to the web, to other computers or devices and also for print. Without everyone being standardized in colour and in brightness, images you’ll send to the web, to friends and to printers may look quite differently than how you intended them to. Also worth noting is that monitors constantly shift in brightness and in colour slowly and slightly over time which makes matters even worse.
That’s why you should be calibrating your monitor on a regular basis if you’re dealing with colour critical publishing online and/or in print. When it comes to printing, all papers print differently depending on the specific printer model, paper surface type, paper absorbency, paper whiteness (also known as temperature) and paper brightness. As a fine art photographer and printer, I create or receive third party image files which I view on screen and carefully try and match them on paper (even after applying custom colour profiles created for specific printer and paper combinations). The closer our monitors match in colour and in brightness, the closer we can get your print to look like the image you see on your screen.
The first time you calibrate your monitor, you’ll be surprised at how much difference there is between your previous manufacturer’s settings and the global standard for monitor colour and brightness. You can find more detailed and technical information on colour calibration and how the resulting colour profiles are created online. If you think you would benefit from colour control in your workflow, some common calibration devices are the X-Rite Eye-One Display, ColorEyes Display, ColorVision Spyder and ColorMunki Photo. These devices come with software that flashes hundreds of different colours on-screen over the course of a few minutes and create a custom profile for your specific monitor based on the measurements collected by the device which is placed against your screen at the beginning of the calibration process. This custom colour profile compensates for any differences in colour values from the standard and will then show accurate monitor colours while the new profile is selected in your system’s colour settings. If you live in Revelstoke, we can also lend you our calibration device for you to get standardized and help you with the process.
Please get in touch with any questions you may have.