Quick and dirty tricks for getting your prints to match your screen…

Once you’re ready to print, you may be among those who just hit print, select the media type, quality level and hope for the best.  If you don’t like what you’re seeing on paper, try this before going mad or spending a long time on trial and error prints (or spending time and money with a calibration product… truly the best way to match screen to printer):

First, use a simple monitor calibration tool… they’re usually free and simply help adjust brightness, contrast, color temp and gamma to fairly balanced levels. Now, unless you’re using a special RGB photo printer with that kind of ink/toner/dye-sub configuration, set your artwork’s color mode to CMYK in Photoshop or Illustrator.  The main problem is often that you’re getting the additive color model of RGB on a monitor to convert to the subtractive color model of CMYK, which just can’t be 100% reproduced (mostly since paper can never be as white and bright as a monitor.  Depending on the colors in your work, you may see an immediate reduction in color gamut (vibrance, saturation).  Next, go to ‘Assign color profile’ in the Edit menu.  Unless you have the exact profile installed for the printer you’re sending the job to, I suggest using ‘U.S. Sheet-fed Coated’ or ‘Uncoated’ depending on the finish of your media.  I find that this produces a good match for nearly every job.  The default is often Web or something commercial and has fairly different properties and a wider gamut.  This will further alter your image on screen, likely darker.  Now ‘Save as…’ a new print-ready file.  I suggest not just saving over your working file since RGB has a bigger gamut and is better to work from a step down in colors because you can’t get them back later otherwise.

Finally for this quick and dirty pre-pressification, this is where you’ll adjust Curves and Levels to get the contrast and brightness back up to where you image on screen is as close as possible to your original intent.  Most of the time, I find I’ll automatically turn up the master CMYK curve 5-10% (lighter) on any images with a moderate to a lot of saturation and dark areas.  It may look a little light on screen but those kind of images will likely print darker and richer than you think on paper.  

The other thing to keep in mind is color values using too much black (which often appear darker and more muted than you saw on screen)… Try turning down the black as much as you can tolerate and make it up with CMY values while maintaining your color integrity… you be the judge.  Also, with ink jets, especially on uncoated paper, and even good quality mat to a lesser extent, you will lose considerable contrast and gamut and brightness as opposed to coated stock, so try to keep any CMYK values between 5% and 95% if possible… if you go under that, the color won’t show up much since it’s party absorbed by the uncoated paper.  If you go to high, you sometimes have so much ink bleeding in, you won’t notice any difference in the hue/saturation.  It may even appear muddy or muddled.

Lastly, if you’re still have issues besides setting the color modes, profiles and curves as described, you can A) try another printer model! and B) go into the printer’s color settings and try to switch on and off their color management option(s), as well as adjust their sliders.  And make a note of the settings!

Ultimately, we’ll all someday have color matching hardware and software like EyeOne or Spider to become scientifically accurate and truly be able to proof our work!  But until then, simple CMYK + Profile assignment with a few curves/levels adjustments can usually make things look good enough!