We say match “as closely as possible” because you can’t expect to achieve an exact match. You have far too many printer and monitor variables to deal with. However, if you properly manage color, you can get a very close match.
To match color between your monitor and your output, you need to first calibrate your monitor and then choose a color workspace profile. In the following sections, you can find all the details.
Color the easy way
If you’re interested in sharing photos only onscreen (that is, on your own website or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on) and you plan to leave the printing to others, you don’t need to bother with color correction and going through a maze of steps to get the color perfected.
Your only consideration for onscreen viewing is your overall monitor brightness. If your monitor displays images darker or lighter than other computers viewing your images, you need to follow the upcoming sections and understand how to adjust your overall monitor brightness.Calibrate your monitor
Your monitor needs to be calibrated to adjust the gamma and brightness; correct any color tints or colorcasts; and generally get your monitor to display, as precisely as possible, accurate colors on your output. You can choose among a few tools to adjust monitor brightness. These tools range from a low-cost hardware device that sells for less than $100 to expensive calibration equipment of $3,000 or more.
Gamma is the brightness of midlevel tones in an image. In technical terms, gamma is a parameter that describes the shape of the transfer function for one or more stages in an imaging pipeline.We skip the costly high-end devices and software utilities that don’t do you any good and suggest that you make, at the very least, one valuable purchase for creating a monitor profile: a hardware profiling system. On the low end, some affordable devices go a long way toward helping you adjust your monitor brightness and color balance. The Pantone Huey calibration tool costs around $75. The newest Datacolor Spyder (Spyder5) costs $140. These are hardware tools to help you create monitor profiles for working with color. The best way to find a device that works for you is to search the Internet for hardware descriptions, dealers, and costs.
On LCD/LED monitors, you need to adjust the hardware controls to bring your monitor into a match for overall brightness with your photo prints. Be certain to run many test prints and match your prints against your monitor view to make the two as similar as possible.
You have a lot to focus on when calibrating monitors and getting the color right on your monitor and your output.
Choose a color workspace
After you adjust your monitor color by using a hardware profiling system, your next step is to choose your color workspace. In Elements, you have a choice between two workspace colors: either sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998). You access your color workspace settings by choosing Edit --> Color Settings. The Color Settings dialog box opens, as shown.
The Color Settings dialog box.The Color Settings dialog box gives you these options:
- No Color Management: This choice turns off all color management. Don’t choose this option for any work you do in Elements. When using No Color Management, you need to work with files that have color profiles embedded in the photos. You most likely won’t use these types of photos.
- Always Optimize Colors for Computer Screens: Selecting this radio button sets your workspace to sRGB. sRGB color is used quite often for viewing images on your monitor, but this workspace often results in the best choice for color printing, too. Many color printers can output all the colors you can see in the sRGB workspace.
- Always Optimize for Printing: Selecting this option sets your color workspace to Adobe RGB (1998). The color in this workspace represents the best color you can see on newer monitors, as well as many of the newer inkjet printers. As a default, this is your best choice.
- Allow Me to Choose: When you select this option, Elements prompts you for a profile assignment when you open images that contain no profile. This setting is handy if you work back and forth between screen and print images.
Understand how profiles work
You probably created a monitor color profile when you calibrated your monitor. You probably also selected a color profile when you opened the Color Settings dialog box and selected your workspace color. When you start your computer, your monitor color profile kicks in and adjusts your overall monitor brightness and corrects for any colorcasts. When you open a photo in Elements, color is converted automatically from your monitor color space to your workspace color.At print time, you use another color profile to output your photos to your desktop color printer. Color is then converted from your workspace color to your printer’s color space. Each of these color profiles, and using each one properly, determine whether you can get good color output.