The ICC developed a vendor-neutral color management system (CMS) that would work across operating systems and software. Keeping the world safe from out-of-control color. They created the ICC, which stands for International Color Consortium. How does your computer translate its RGB color road map to your CMYK photo printer?īack in 1993, some big-brain folks tackled the translation problem. So it’s up to you to teach your display how it should look. Unsupervised, your computer screen will continue to display its own evolving versions of reality. So if that’s the case, your fabulous looking picture will always look different everywhere else in the universe, including on your prints.Īll computer monitors and TVs natively display their images with slight or sometimes significant differences.Īnd to make the problem worse, their base color and luminance levels will drift over time as they age. Your monitor may not be perfectly adjusted. Yes, it may not be your printer’s fault at all. So how many levels of color translation do you have to get through before your printer even starts its dance? (which would seem to make the color translation from my computer to printer even more confusing!)Īnd to further complicate matters, many CMYK ink printers actually operate in RGB mode.
My Epson Artisan has four CMYK ink cartridges, plus a light cyan and a light magenta cartridge So how does one color language talk to the other? Many home printers use inks that follow the CMYK color model:.Your computer screen uses an RGB color model:.Today, much of your home technology puts color together using two very different color models. There are three main factors that contribute to this pesky problem: So my friend and I aren’t alone in our quest for a printed photo that actually looks the way we want it to. “Because computer displays are illuminated, images displayed on computers will tend to look more luminous than when printed.” Here’s a little quote I found buried in one of Apple’s printing support pages. Then, we could move on to the next home tech challenge.įirst off, reproducing color is complicated.Īnd it turns out the sensors in our eyes are really hard to replicate.Īll of today’s remarkable technology that displays or prints a photograph can’t reproduce every shade of color Mother Nature gave the puny human race to enjoy.Įach device has its own limited range of color representation or “gamut.”Įven Apple says it’s a hard trick to pull off. Shouldn’t this seemingly simple task be WYSIWYG? I usually avoid the issue by boosting the chroma and brightness of the photo I’m about to create, because my Epson Artisan 837 typically prints it looking a little flat by comparison. Whether it’s from the original JPEG photo on your camera or a slightly enhanced version that you’ve tweaked in your photo editing software…ĭifficult enough for this home-tech everyman to struggle with the same problem. There’s still hope.Ī friend of mine complained to me recently she finds it impossible to print a picture from her computer and match what’s on her screen. But don’t throw out your printer just yet. If you can’t make your home photo printer spit out a matching copy, you’re not alone. Quick… What are these six colors? Now print them.