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COLOUR MATCHING
FACTORS THAT AFFECT THE APPEARANCE OF PRINTS
If you wish to manually adjust the colour settings in your printer
driver, please be aware that colour reproduction is a complex topic,
and there are many factors to take into consideration. Some of the
most important factors are listed below.
1. Differences between the range of colours a monitor or printer
can reproduce
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Neither a printer nor a monitor is capable of
reproducing the full range of colours visible to the
human eye. Each device is restricted to a certain range
of colours. In addition to this, a printer cannot
reproduce all of the colours displayed on a monitor, and
vice versa.
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Both devices use very different technologies to
represent colour. A monitor uses Red, Green and Blue
(RGB) phosphors (or LCDs), a printer uses Cyan, Yellow,
Magenta and Black (CMYK) toner or ink.
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A monitor can display very vivid colours such as intense
reds and blues and these cannot be easily produced on
any printer using toner or ink. Similarly, there are
certain colours, (some yellows for example), that can be
printed, but cannot be displayed accurately on a
monitor. This disparity between monitors and printers
is often the main reason that printed colours do not
match the colours displayed onscreen.
2. Viewing conditions
A print can look very different under different lighting conditions. For
example, the colours in a print may look different when viewed
standing next to a sunlit window, compared to how they look under
standard office fluorescent lighting.