How To Color Calibrate Your Monitor To Your Printer

Since the early days of desktop publishing, photo editing, and graphic design, professionals, budding professionals, and hobbyists alike have had to deal with color shifts—seeing one color on a monitor but getting different results when the document, photograph, or artwork prints. Red fruit on a monitor, for instance, comes out orange, chartreuse, neon, or plastic looking bright red.

- William Harrel

Why? The simplest answer is that monitors and printers see colors differently. In other words, they use different color models to produce the same hues. Monitors combine red, green, and blue (RGB) to display the colors you see, while most printers combine cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) to reproduce colors.

It’s important to note that many photo printers start with the basic CMYK process color model but deploy as many as 12 ink colors. The more colors you tack on to your color model, the wider the range of colors (known as the color “gamut”) the device can reproduce, and the more difficult it becomes for monitors and printers to output matching colors.

YOUR EQUIPMENT

Whether you’re a professional desktop publisher, photographer, graphic artist, novice, or hobbyist, the quality of your equipment is important. In fact, if you’re a professional—and your living is dependent on the quality of your work—you should buy the best equipment you can afford.

Everyday displays that cost $200 to $500 aren’t really designed for photo editing and design work. Their manufacturers assume that you’ll be doing mostly basic office tasks, such as running Microsoft Office programs, reading and writing emails, and following social media.