Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
A Room with a View?
Color is subjective to start with, and if you’re going to be viewing it and making decisions about its rightness or wrongness, you need to reduce
the variables in your viewing environment. Here are some tips:
■ Use (or create) a neutral gray for your monitor’s desktop color. Extraneous colors will alter your perception of the colors of the image you’re
working on.
■ Pay attention to everything in your field of view that could affect your color judgement. Ceilings, walls, and floors should be neutral gray, if
at all possible. You can buy flat, neutral gray paint (Standard Gray Neutral 8) or mix it yourself.
■ By the same token, don’t let anything behind you contaminate the image onscreen. Wear neutral-colored clothes when correcting critical
images onscreen. This is not as silly as it sounds. Hard-core digitalists have been known to only wear black turtlenecks and remove all jewelry
to make sure the monitor is not reflecting back unwanted colors. No bright lights, no colorful posters from Hawaii.
■ If you just can’t control the light in a room, at least make a hood for the monitor to shield it from distracting light. Black Foam Core material
available at any art supply store works great.
■ Make the overall ambient light in the room dim and low. Adjust shades or blinds over windows, and if you use rheostats on light fixtures,
realize that they affect the light’s color temperature (incandescents get redder as you turn them down). If you can’t darken your room, consider
using an LCD monitor, as they offer a brighter display, and can be used effectively with higher levels of ambient lighting.
■ If possible, use a graphics-standard viewing booth and/or lightbox for viewing and evaluating prints. These devices illuminate at an industry
standard 5000º Kelvin (also called D5000 or just D50) and have dimmers so you can match the brightness of the monitor to the prints when
soft proofing. Excellent viewing booths are made by GTI and Just Normlicht to provide both transparency viewing (luminance) and reflection-copy
viewing (illuminance) in the same unit.
■ If a viewing booth is out of the question for evaluating prints, at least try to think about and carefully select the artificial lights for the printviewing
area. Incandescent tungsten light (regular light bulbs) is the worst choice; it’s too heavy on the red end of the color spectrum. Regular
fluorescent tubes (“cool whites”) have their own quirks, like having spectral spikes in the green and blue ranges and changing color as they
warm up and as they age. Quartz or tungsten halogen lamps are whiter and preferred by some, but specialized professional lamps from Ott-
Lite and Solux are even better for bringing you closer to industry standards. (See more about displaying prints in Chapter 9.)
Generic Profiles
Canned or generic profiles come in two basic varieties: (1) preloaded in the printer-driver
software by the manufacturer for use with its recommended inks and media, and (2) available
from third-party providers of inks and media for use with their products. Keep in
mind that these profiles are made for all printers of the type you have. They don’t take
into account any individual characteristics of your printer or anything that’s specific to
your workflow. They’re made for the average printer, and for that reason, they may or may
not be adequate for your needs. Consider them as starting points to get you in the ballpark
of good printing.
Generic profiles are often free, especially if the supplier is trying to sell you something else.
However, you can also buy them from several sources for under $50 each. The emphasis
is on the word each. If, for example, you needed a profile for an Epson 2200 running original
Epson inks on Arches Infinity Smooth paper, that’s one profile (see Figure 4.11). If
you wanted to switch to Arches Infinity Textured paper, that requires another profile.
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag? Yet another, and from a different vendor. You can see why people
collect lots of profiles.