Printing Problems
You may notice a huge difference between the photos on your monitor. It can either be lighter or darker than the ones you preview on your monitor. They may even exhibit different color schemes than what you were expecting.The problem you are running into is that your monitor is not calibrated with the printer you are using. The printer's black might look gray on your monitor if you have your brightness turned way up. What looks orange on your computer may very well print red because the color settings are off.
Adjust Brightness and Color
The two most common adjustments you can make to your monitor to balance it with your printer output are brightness and color.Brightness
The most common issue with monitor brightness is
that it is turned up too high. This results in prints that are much
darker than you expect, and a loss of detail in shadow areas.
Let's say you take a photograph and transfer the
photo from memory card to computer. You look at it on the monitor, where
you have the brightness set to 100%. Everything looks good to you, so
you print it out. Your printer may have a
brightness setting of 50%. Your printed photo is twice as dark as what
you see on your monitor.
This is an extreme example, but proves a point.
When you have your monitor brightness turned up too high, all of your
prints turn out dark.
Color
The colors displayed on your monitor can be as far
off from your prints as the brightness. Monitors display colors using
different color temperatures.
When the color temperature of your monitor does
not match the color temperature of your printer, all the colors in your
prints will be slightly off. You may have noticed this, you may not. You
will certainly see it if you display an image on your monitor and hold
up a printed photo next to it.
About the only drawback to changing the color
temperature of your monitor is that it may turn anything white (like all
word processing documents) into a sickly yellow color. Since this is
really hard on the eyes, I recommend setting up two different color
profiles for your monitor. Create one for general use and another
special one to preview your photos. The ability to create a monitor profile is part of Adobe Photoshop software functionality. On Mac OS, you can use the Apple calibration utility to create a monitor
profile.
Test Prints
The easiest way that I know of to get a really close match between your printer and monitor is to make some test prints. Without adjusting your monitor settings, send some photos to your printer. Make sure that you print at a fairly large size (5x7 or larger) — this will make it easier for you to see detail and color in the photo.Once the print has been made, open the photo on your computer so that it displays on your monitor. Hold the printed photograph right up to the monitor and compare the two images side by side. Now you can adjust your monitor brightness and color settings. Make minute adjustments until the printed photo matches the monitor photo as much as possible.
While it will be hard to get a perfect match, you can get very close. Once you make these adjustments, you should see more consistency between the photos that you see on your monitor and the photos that you print.
