Color Matching Your Prints

We get a lot of questions here at the shop about just how to go about getting the color you see on your monitor to match what we print here in the shop. This page has been created to give you a little information about just why your prints may not match your monitor and how to go about correcting the problem.

Notes:

• Please make some test prints at the shop or through our online ordering system and request “No Corrections” before you panic about your color. You need to know that you have a problem before you try to fix it.
• Don’t make yourself crazy about calibration unless you have an issue with it. This guide is primarily for those who adjust their own images at home. If you’re happy letting our trained professionals color correct your images, just send them on in.
• We color and density correct every imaged submitted to our lab unless specifically requested not to and our lab techs are very good at what they do. You might never have to worry about your color if you let us do all of the heavy lifting!

Great, so if you’re still interested in how to go about matching your monitor to your prints, read on!

1. Calibrate your monitor. I can’t stress how important it is to calibrate your monitor to a good baseline before you start playing around with color. It makes it very difficult to fine-tune the color of your monitor if you haven’t calibrated it first. You can calibrate your monitor in a basic fashion using software that ships with some editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, but your best results will come from using a hardware monitor calibration tool. We sell calibration tools here in the shop from about $99. A tool like this is a must-have if you’re interested in your color being accurate and consistent. You can get by without one, but life is easier with one and who couldn’t use a device like that?
2. Photoshop (or any other piece of photo editing software) and Windows don’t share the same color space. In other words, don’t proof your images outside of your editing software and expect them to match your prints. If you look at an image in Internet Explorer or our online ordering software, expect the color to look different than Photoshop because your color profiling is not being applied to those images. This does not affect the actual color of the images, just the appearance of the images. The image in Photoshop is the only one you should be looking at to proof color.
3. Color space is important and you should set up Photoshop to convert your images to your working space. You do this in Photoshop’s Color Settings panel in the Edit Menu (Shift+Control+K) under the Color Management Policies section. Our working color space here in the lab is SRGB 2.1.
4. Your monitor is lying to you. No matter how many times you run calibration software on your machine, you’re only giving it a baseline to work from. Beyond that you’re going to need to tweak your monitor to match our color manually. The next time you’re in the shop, grab a Printed Color Target from us that you can bring home to compare to your monitor. You can then grab the Monitor Calibration target image directly from our blog here. Open that image in Photoshop and compare the printed target to it. Then tweak your monitor to match the printed target.

This should get you pretty dialed in to what the lab produces. Then either send in or bring in some “no-corrections” test prints to the lab to ensure that you’re close on your color and you’re all set. If you have any further questions about getting your color to match, please come on in and ask.