Absolute Beginner's Guide to Digital Photography

Making Your Prints Match the

Monitor—Gamuts and Color

Management

Prints don’t look exactly like the image on the

monitor. And just as in darkroom printing, a great

deal of time and money is wasted by photogra-

phers who make print after print until the image is

perfect. Software like Adobe Gamma is very help-

ful, but it only begins to solve some parts of the

problem of getting prints to match the monitor.

Adobe Gamma is available with Photoshop and

Photoshop Elements.

The real problem is that a computer does not

“know” two important pieces of information: How accurately does your monitor

reproduce colors, and how accurately does your printer reproduce colors. All a com-

puter does is send instructions to the monitor and to the printer about what color

each pixel should be. A computer has no way of receiving feedback about how each

device actually illuminates screen phosphors or mixes inks. As a result, when the

monitor and the printer have different “ideas” about what the color “red 220, green

164, blue 139” looks like, the print will not look like the image on the screen. Even

when the monitor is calibrated with Adobe Gamma software, the inks and dyes used

by printers rarely form colors identical to the colors of a monitor (see the sidebar

“Human Vision and Color Gamuts”).

CHAPTER 20 COLOR THEORY 297

FIGURE 20.5
Color negative
printing
process.

RGB RGB RGB

Adobe Gamma soft-

ware is monitor calibration

software that significantly

improves the color balance and

contrast of a monitor.