To get a true replica of an image on any device, photos need to be transformed. Digital photos use the RGB colour profile and printers use CYMK. You get more colours from a printer than a digital display screen can show. To get the best visual cue of what your final printout will be, there are some steps you can take to alter what you see on your screen to resemble a truer depiction of what a printer will create.
Here's how to change your system to better match printer outputs
1. Calibrate the display monitor
This process will differ among Operating Systems. The Window’s operating system has a feature called “Display Colour Calibration”. The settings alter gamma, brightness, contrast, and colours at once, saving the hassle of continuously altering each aspect individually. With your screen calibrated to a specific standard, you’ll get a truer likeness of the colours that’ll be printed. It will never be a true rendering though because monitors use the RGB colour profile and printers use the CYMK colour profile. Both are acronyms. RGB stands for Red, Blue, and Green. CYMK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key. That’s why there are always subtle differences between what you see on your monitor and a printout of a photo.
2. Check your settings for “Rendering Intent”
The rendering intent is an algorithmic process that’s used to determine which colour to show when a colour tone is outside of the gamut of the display screen. The two most common are perceptual (system default on Windows) and “Relative Colorimetric”. Leaving this as the perceptual setting will replace any out-of-gamut colours with the closest matching colour.
Relative Colorimetric will maintain all the colours it can, but those that are outside of the colours the screen can display will be changed. This can turn shadows darker and lighter areas brighter resulting in drastic changes to print outputs. Absolute Colorimetric will create even more changes to the colour tones. If you’re using editing software, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign, conversions from RGB to CYMK can be done, and you can preview in different methods by altering the saturation. In Lightroom, “black point compensation” is usually turned on to maintain details in the print output.
3. Check you’re using the correct colour space for your project
There are three colour spaces. sRGB is for web viewing, RGB is for digital viewing, and CYMK is for printing. Different graphic/photo editing programs provide different colour spaces. When you’re editing photos intended for print, set the colour space to CYMK. RGB is fine for digital picture frames, and the sRGB is for basic needs. To confuse matters more, there’s Adobe RGB which provides up to 35% more colour space, but very few printers support Adobe RGB resulting in prints reverting to the basic RGB, altering the expected results. Before sending any jobs to print, ensure you have the right colour space selected.
With a few tweaks to your computer setup, you can drastically alter the colour perception, contrast, and sharpness of the picture quality, leaving less guesswork and more surety of a quality print.