Why don't my prints match my screen?

The other day Keith was asked if calibrating and profiling a monitor would make someone's screen match their prints?

Some thoughts and potential solutions for this common problem.

• This article was written several years ago and has (Sept 2010) been updated with some newer links and information.

Can my prints ever match my screen?

The short answer is no,
...but the reasons may be much more varied than you first thought, and with care you can get the two very close.

Hopefully this short guide (and the links to other more detailed information) will be of help?

After profiling and calibrating your monitor...

Let's assume that you have read all the articles about how important it is to have your monitor calibrated.

You are not quite happy with the quality of prints you are getting and decide to buy a screen calibrator like the Spyder4express or even the basic Pantone Huey.

FYI: I've set up a LinkedIn group (~4700 members) for people interested in all aspects of Digital Black and White photography: Digital Black and White

Does this now mean that your prints will look better?

Well maybe, but it really is only part of what you need to know...

Right >
Chillies at a Seattle market stall -- can you get a print to match what you see here?

Matching up what's on the screen to your prints covers a whole range of issues, some of which may not be so obvious at first.

If you send your images away to be printed, then you may well get better prints just from sorting out your monitor (especially if it looks quite different after you've first calibrated it). However, if you are doing your own printing, there's a bit more to do.

I never print most of my professional photographic work, it goes directly (digitally) to the clients.

That means that I'm relying on the accuracy of my own screen to know what I'm sending them.

Of course I have to trust that they actually know what to do with the images ... not always the case ... it's one of the reasons that part of my work involves training in colour management, and I write these articles :-)

Where I do produce prints, such as my Landscape work, we have two large printers at the Northlight offices.

There's the huge Epson 9600 (44" print width) and a slightly smaller Epson 7880 (24" print width).

I've lots more printer information in some of our printer reviews.

Review - Epson 7880
Review - Canon iPF6300
Review - Epson 3880
Review - Canon 9500 II
Review - Epson 2880

Getting good results from our big printers takes some care and is not cheap. What about ordinary desktop printers?

It turns out that there an awful lot of factors that influence whether a print 'looks the same' as on a monitor.

I'll briefly mention some of the most important ones and provide some links to more detailed information that you can explore if interested.

How does your camera capture 'real life' colours?

The file produced by your camera has to fit the range of colours and brightnesses it 'sees' in the 'real world' into a more limited range in its image files.

The limited range is called a colour space, and is a subset of all possible colours that you could actually see.

In fact, since digital camera sensors can 'see' colours (such as infra red) that the eye cannot, there are additional problems that arise.

Fortunately the camera manufacturers are getting pretty good at this...

The more technical version of this would be - How do you map the the original image to your choice of working colour space (for example - how the real world is fitted into Adobe98 or sRGB by your camera)

Choosing a working space - some of Keith's thoughts
There are reviews of Digital camera profiling and Scanner profiling which cover more aspects of profile choice.
What's in a digital camera? A short guide from TASI

How does the image get displayed on your screen?

Your screen can only display a subset of the colours present in the file from the camera - the translation from what is in the file to what is on the screen is carried out using the monitor profile.

Different screens have different capabilities, so even matching images on two screens is not a trivial task.

The two images below show the difference in performance (size of black triangle) between my own laptop and Apple 23" screen

The range of colours covered (the gamut) is greater with the Apple 23" LCD (the graphs are part of my Eye One Display 2 review)

The review of the Spyder3elite has quite a bit more on monitor calibration and what it actually means.
A well written introduction to colour management - includes more detailed explanations of some of the graphs and diagrams in this article.

How does the image get converted to a print?

Just as your monitor only has a limited range of colours that it can display, your printer/ink/paper combination has a limited range of colours that can be printed.

The printer profile is part of what can be used to do the translation from what is wanted to what is possible.

Even if you print without using profiles, there is still the equivalent function going on inside of your printer driver -- although it's usually well hidden by the writers of the printer driver software.

The range of colours available depends on the type of ink and paper you are using, as well as how these are actually combined in the printer.

Suffice to say, there are wide variations between printer models and makes.

What's more there are usually:

Colours that can be represented in your image, displayed on your screen and printed
Colours that can be represented in your image, displayed on your screen but cannot be printed
Colours that can be represented in your image, not displayed on your screen but can be printed
Colours that can be represented in your image, not displayed on your screen and cannot be printed

The picture to the right shows a 3D representation of colours that can be displayed on my 23" LCD and printed on my old Epson 1290 (Epson PGP paper)

The shapes represent the range of colours (gamut) - the 3D representation reflects the combination of colour and brightness variations

Notice how certain light yellows and dark cyans can be printed but not displayed on my monitor.

The differences are somewhat exaggerated in this view, but they do exist.

If you are wondering what happens to non printable colours when you try and print them, it all depends on what's called the rendering intent.

This is either built into printer drivers or you specify it when printing with profiles (it's a bit more complex to explain than fits in this article)

Thus we have potential problems in that:

1. The image file produced by the camera is not the same as the 'Real World'
2. The screen view is not the same as what is in the image file
3. The printed version is also not the same as in the image file, but in a different way to the screen view

And that's before you even get round to looking at the the screen and prints...

There is lots more info about printer profiling on this site but you might want to start with my reviews of the ColorMunki and SpyderPrint SR
Soft proofing is one way to simulate more accurately how your prints will look - see this very useful introduction by Bruce Fraser
Use of soft proofing to show out of gamut colours when comparing different printer profiles (part of the original PrintFIX review)
Good explanation of Rendering Intent by Bruce Fraser

How does my choice of ink and paper reflect light?

How white is white in your prints?

With a print, the whitest white you can get (without white ink) is the reflected colour of the paper. This will undoubtedly be different from what your monitor emits when it is displaying white.

Some papers have optical brightening agents in them (OBAs) which absorb UV light and re-emit it as a blue light. This can be quite bright when the paper is viewed in daylight, but completely missing when using ordinary tungsten lighting (which has no UV component to speak of)

Different ink types also produce different results on different papers - how black is the deepest black you can get for example?

Some of the chemicals that go into paper
Some of the myths about pigment and dye inks explained
Compensating for OBA in the i1 iSis (review)

How does my choice of viewing lighting affect prints?

The visible colour of dyes and pigments in the coloured parts of your images also vary with the kind of light you are using.

Try a simple experiment - match two similarly coloured pieces of clothing (from different manufacturers) in tungsten lighting - then take them to a window (north facing on a clear sunny day is particularly good) ... do they still match?

There are many ways of measuring lighting, but you will often hear of the colour temperature of a light source. This is the same as the setting you may have used in your monitor calibration.

You can think of it as how yellow or blue the colour white is.

A low colour temperature (2800K) might equate to the yellowish white of a tungsten light bulb
Daylight might be 'whiter' white -- maybe 6000K
Light from a north facing window with a clear blue sky at noon might be 9-12000K

There is also a measure of the 'quality' of light for colour rendition, compared to an arbitrary 'perfect' daylight.

This gives what is known as a CRI or colour rendition index (100 is perfect)

Some monitor calibration tools give the ability to measure the quality of ambient lighting.

The diagram shows the results when testing the quality of an energy saving light bulb with an Eye One.

The bumpy red line shows the spectrum of the bulb compared to daylight. It is so bad for colour rendering that it scored zero.

So ... never check prints under energy saving light bulbs unless that is where they are going to be displayed!

Why do my prints look too dark - a further article explores this common question
Review of a commercial Print viewing stand - The one we use here
Detailed info on CRI and what it means
Short WP article on Colour temperature
Information about specialist bulbs with good CRI from Solux (note -- frames based site)
Keiths review of the GrafiLite - an economicprint viewing light

How does the human visual system perceive colour/contrast under different light intensities?

Our visual system is tremendously good at adapting to the ambient lighting conditions. We automatically adapt our own 'white point' to the brightest white in our visual field. We also compensate for colour casts, so for example, you do not see everyone looking slightly green when you are sitting under a leafy tree on a sunny day.

As a result of this, the lighting conditions where you work can have quite a noticeable effect on how images on a screen, or a print are perceived.

To compare a print with an image on screen, they both need to be similar in brightness. You can get special viewing cabinets, with special adjustable lighting, designed for comparison work (they are not cheap - see the link above)

Following on from this, one of the worst ways to compare a print with an image on screen, is to hold the print up next to the monitor. It is far better to have the print well lit, to one side of the monitor. You make a point of physically turning your head to look at the print - it take a bit of practice, but the comparison is much more accurate.

At lower light levels the eye sees images with a slight blue shift in colours, so in a dim room and with a dim monitor, a colour temperature setting of 5000K may look OK, whereas in more normal working conditions it would look rather yellow. This also helps explain why dim candle light with a colour temperature below 2000K doesn't seem as yellow as first might be thought.

There are two nice examples of colour adaptation on the colorcube web site (example 1, example 2)
Interesting information that helps simulates types of colour vision deficiencies
More Colour blindness info - includes resources for web designers
How dark should your room be? Article on the ISO lighting standards
Soft proofing and print comparison (PDF article -making the monitor really match the proof) - from the excellent Hutcheson site
Understanding and modelling colour - useful article with relevant links from TASI
Colour Vision - Very complete collection of info. fascinating stuff but -way- beyond what you probably wanted to know :-)

So, does monitor calibration really help match my prints to what's on the screen?

As you can see, there are a lot of variables...

One of the best arguments for a using colour management (a colour managed workflow) is that it nails a lot of the variables down, so when things don't work, you have a much shorter list of things to investigate.

The factors I've listed come into play even if you don't actively use any 'colour management' at all. For example, if you just print using the printer driver settings, there are the equivalent of printer profiles and rendering intents built in to the driver software. You are just working with -lots- more variables.

Yes it does help, but it's only part of the solution...

One of the key realisations I made, and a reason for writing this article, is that asking to match prints to a screen is really getting things the wrong way round.

If you are aiming for prints, then the view on your screen is only an intermediate stage in the workflow from camera to final print.

Remember:

It's quite possible that the best print does not come from the best screen version of your image - get over this and you can concentrate more on print quality.

The picture to the right has been adjusted to look OK on the web.

The print version for my Epson 7880 has had saturations for the deep reds and blues turned up considerably.

The version that looked the best on a Canon iPF6300 was different again - not by much, but enough to make a difference.

You need to experiment with good known test images for this, don't initially rely on using your own photos.

We've a collection of downloadable test images that may be of help.

I hope this brief guide has been of help - I always welcome feedback and questions about my reviews and articles. It helps me and helps improve this site :-)
There is a corresponding blog entry for this article, for comments/questions

More Info on this site

Spyder3Express - A review of Datacolor's basic calibrator and why you need to use one
Room and office decoration and lighting for photo editing
Some information on what to consider when setting up a space to work on digital images and evaluate prints.
Beware the colour management tar pit - As colour management hardware comes down in price, more and more people are being told it will cure all their problems. A personal view from Keith covering some of the things it is good for, but also why you should be careful to understand why you are doing it in the first place.
Why do my prints look too dark - another common question we're asked
The PrintFIX PRO review
Black and white printing with MonoChromePro inks and QuadToneRIP
A review of a specialist B/W printing ink set. The Eye One is used to linearise curves for the shareware QuadToneRIP package.
Better B/W printing - using a scanner to get better black and white printing
An Introduction to colour management article by Keith and collection of CM info.
The Viewing page - basic monitor set-up
Print viewing distances - what printer and image resolutions to use for different print sizes.
Colour management links on this site
Colour Management Check-up kit review
Eye One scanner profiling - review
Using the Eye One with a scan target to get better results form your film or flatbed scanner.
The Spyder2 PRO - review
The Eye one Display 2 - review
Printer profiling with the Eye One Photo
The Eye-One iO automated scanning table - review
An automated solution to improving the quality and accuracy of target measurement for printer profiles when using the Eye One spectrophotometer.
Review of the printer profile editor in Eye One Match.

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