Interesting Reading

Excerpt from Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers - Martin Evening

24/02/08

I came across this article it helped to put things in perspective, but I am still at a loss to explain why sometimes even with a calibrated monitor, what I see on the screen is not what I get from the printer. If anyone has come across solutions to this problem please reply.

An advertising agency art buyer was once invited to address a meeting of photographers. The chair, suggested we could ask him anything we wanted, except "would you like to see my book, we couldn't ask him why he hadn't called it back in again. And if he had called it in again we were not allowed to ask why we didn't get the job. And finally, if we did get the job we were absolutely forbidden to ask him why the colour in the printed ad looked nothing like our original photograph.

That in a nutshell is a problem which has bugged all our working lives. And it is one will be familiar to anyone who has ever experienced the difficulty of matching colours on a comouter system with the original or a printed output.

So why is there sometimes such a marked difference between what is seen on the screen and tha ctual printed result? Digital images are nothing more than just bunches of binary digits and good colour management is all about making sense of those numbers and translating them them into meaningful colours at the various stages of the image making process.

Try to keep in mind that this is an expert in the field of digital photography speaking about an issue that affects professionals.

More to come on this subject:
  • Why not all RGB spaces are the same
  • RGB devices
  • Interpreting the colour data