Photos Off-Color? Some PC Tweaks Can Help

• Ted Needleman
• On 6:43 pm EDT, Thursday September 24, 2009

You're back from vacation with memory cards full of photos. At your computer, you spend hours in Photoshop fine-tuning each precious memory.

But when you print out your carefully tuned image, what you get isn't quite what you see on your monitor -- or in your memory.

Don't blame your computer, your camera or even your printer. Chances are, the color disparity stems from the way you perceive color and the different ways electronic devices display it.

You can't change the laws of physics that rule light and color perception. But with a few simple tweaks to your computer's setup, you can help the blue skies in your photos match the rich azure shades you recall from your summer getaway.

Question Of Light Frequencies

A computer monitor emits light of different frequencies, a mix of the three primary colors: red, green and blue, or RGB.

The colors we see on a printout, by contrast, are made up of different frequencies of light reflected off of the ink on the surface of the paper -- in most cases cyan, yellow, magenta and key (black), though some photo printers add additional colors to gain even more color accuracy.

A slight mismatch between the RGB colors on the screen and the CYMK colors used in the print can result in photos that look off-color.

To correct this, the International Color Consortium created the ICC profile, a set of data that defines how devices such as printers and monitors handle colors. The ICC information tells your computer how to display colors on the monitor and what colors to mix to reproduce those hues in print.

Most imaging devices have ICC profiles created by the manufacturer. They're included with the device or available for download.

Printers may have several profiles, each targeted for use with a specific type of paper. Using these profiles in an image editing program that supports them, like Photoshop, will usually mean better color fidelity.

Using ICC profiles is as easy as downloading the right ICC files for each device and telling your computer to use them.

For your computer monitor, this means tweaking the display settings. To adjust the setting, use your operating system's control or preferences panel to adjust the "color management" properties of the display and pick the ICC profile that matches your device.

When printing, you choose the ICC settings in software you're using to print, such as Photoshop or iPhoto. You often can tweak those settings in the print settings menu.

Calibrate Printer, Monitor

For even better results, you can do what professional photographers do: Calibrate the specific printer and paper you are going to use with your monitor. This process produces a custom ICC profile that yields the best color accuracy.

It sounds technical, but it's not hard. You do need an instrument called a spectrocolorimeter, a device about the size of a computer mouse, that measures color.

Professionals use models that cost thousands of dollars. For those of us on a smaller budget, Datacolor's Spyder3 Studio or X-Rite's (NasdaqGS:XRIT - News) ColorMunki Photo will work fine.

The $499 Spyder3 Studio is the latest in a product line that's been around for more than a decade. The device has two sensors, one for creating an ICC profile for the monitor, the other for the printer. The screen sensor can also calibrate a large-screen TV or projector.

Newer in the market is the ColorMunki Photo. Priced the same as the Datacolor Spyder3 Studio, ColorMunki uses the same handheld spectrocolorimeter to create ICC settings for both the monitor and printer.

Both work the same way.

First you calibrate the monitor using a sensor and the included software to get accurate colors on the display.

Next you print a page of color test patches using the printer and paper you plan to use. As you move the spectrocolorimeter over each patch, the device reads the color values of the color swatches that you printed and notes the differences between the intended color and what your printer is actually producing. That information is used to create a custom ICC Profile that fine-tunes the printer's output.

The whole process takes about 30 minutes but has to be done only once for each printer and paper type you're using.

For those in a hurry, ColorMunki offers an abbreviated test file with a smaller number of color patches for faster profiling. It's not quite as accurate as using the test files with a large number of patches.

Either way, the Datacolor Spyder3 or X-Rite ColorMunki will both let you turn out gallery-quality prints. And if you've spent hundreds of dollars on camera equipment and lenses, you don't want to waste that investment with lousy prints.

Buzz up!