Color management - screen image and printed output mismatch

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I have Windows XO Pro as my OS and I use Photoshop 3 and Publisher 98 now and
again for domestic projects. I also like to use colour sometimes in Word and
Excel documents.

Like probably 95% of the rest of you I get a mismatch between the colours I
see on the monitor screen and colours as printed.

Up till now I've just accepted it as one of those things but, having decided
after 8 years of intermitent use that it might be a good idea to work through
the Photoshop tutorial :-7 I've come across the notions of monitor
calibration and colour (or even color) management and I realise it doesn't
(necessarily) have to be like that. The problem is, I don't understand
whether my mid-range and rather old set up CAN be improved and I certainly
don't understand, from what I've read, how to go about it even if it were
possible.

I've come across a lot of highly technical jargon. I can see that for
someone who manipulates images and/or does printing professionally it's
worthwhile learning what the terms mean and shelling out for densitometers,
spectographs and whathaveyou to get it as right as possible. I'm not in that
league, I just would like to bring the two closer together so I'm not
disappointed when I print a document.

I tried the test document for CMYK which comes with Photoshop (and which is
used in their calibration tuorial) and I made a test card on Publisher for
RGB pure amd mixed colours. Leaving aside the Photoshop image (which had a
pinky/orangey cast when I printed it), all the test blocks of colours on both
proofs print the same (I mean CMYK cyan prints the same colour as RGB
green/blue and so on) but:

(1) neither set looks the same as its screen image apart from both yellows
(CMYK 100 yellow; RGB 255 red/255green). The reds (CMYK 100 magenta/100
yellow; RGB 255 red) are not too bad but all the others are different - the
RGB test colours, pure and mixed, all print duller and darker; the CMYK pure
test colours print duller and darker; the mixed colours print lighter

(2) I've noticed that, although the six pure and mixed RGB colours print the
same as the six pure and mixed CMYK colours, when I compare the two test
cards documents on the screen the colours are different - the RGB colours in
Publisher look much more vibrant than the CMYK colours in Photoshop (although
when I did an experiment and created test patches in RGB colours in
Photoshop, they looked the same on the screen as the Publisher colours).
Perhaps this is normal.

My monitor is a Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 73 and my printer a (1996!) HP
Deskjet 693c. I don't do enough colour printing to justify buying new
hardware, I'd just like to know if there's any tweaking I can do to improve
matters.

I understand some of the principles of Photoshop monitor and printing ink
setups but I think that even if I cracked those compensation processes, it
would have no effect for the mismatch in Word; Excel and, more important,
Publisher (which I use much more often), would it?

I've tried going into Display in Control Panel and found that under Color
Management all there is are the choices between is330.icm; kodak_dc.icm and
sRGB Color Space Profile.icm. To be honest I don't know what was the default
before I "explored" but it's now set to sRGB Color Space Profile.icm.

Any suggestions?

Thank you
 
Photoshop aside, You actually have two device related problems- Display and
printer.
If the picture is not displayed accurately on the monitor, you don't know
what it should look like when printed.
Normal consumer ink jet/bubble jet printers, by default, usually print a bit
darker than they really should. I never decided if this was due to customer
preference or the mfrs desire to sell more ink.

Anyway. it is generally a good idea to use a reference picture and color
chards/ grayscale charts to generally set the display to something
reasonable.

http://www.cybergrass.com/Articles/color2.html
Shows two such charts

I would list a few others, but my search engines are currently bogged down
in non relevant paying web sites.
 
Those articles by Bob Cherry certainly explain the concepts and terms better
than any other I've read - thank you Chuck.

Strangely, though, the gamma and RBG charts as displayed when I viewed the
articles as web pages looked quite different to how they did when I'd copied
and pasted them into a Word document - (web page had a gamma of 1.3 and the
RGB had the different blocks in the middle, Word was a perfect 1.0 and all
colours of the RGB were uniform).

What you said about all printers "over saturating" with colour does seem to
accord with my results. Perhaps there will never be a solution but at least
this exercise has made me more aware of what discrepancies to expect.
Before, it was always just an annoyance that the colours didn't look 'right'
- I hadn't looked into the consistent patterns of the 'wrongness' - now, I
should know that coloured text, shaded table cells and clip-art images, etc
will generally look darker/more saturated. Discrepancies between the display
and printing of photographic images, I suppose, need to be analysed in the
same way, I suppose, and I must learn how to use Photoshop tools to
compensate for consistent differences.

Perhaps all I can do is make sure, that the monitor display is as accurate
as it can be. I'll try to buy a test card for the target RGB and CMYK
colours - obviously it's no good downloading anything as it'll be displayed
on the same montitor I'm trying to check!

Ever the optimist, I'd still like to hear from anyone else who has any ideas
about bringing the monitor display and the printed output closer together.
 
If you are willing to spend a few dollars, one solution is to use a "Huey"
to setup your monitor (CRT or LCD) to a standard.
http://www.gretagmacbeth.com/products_huey_software.htm
http://www.ppmag.com/reviews/200605_pantonehuey.pdf
Once this is done, "reference" pictures should more or less look as they
were intended.
http://www.brucelindbloom.com/
Has some references pictures
http://digitaldog.net/files/Printer Test file.jpg.zip is also a
reference picture
Next, adjusting the printer to match is the major pain. The printer will
never exactly match the display, although it is possible to get a reasonable
color balance and grey scale. To make matters worse, you may find that after
a lot of "tweak and tune" using reference colors and greyscale shades , the
printer is providing a printed picture that appears "weak" or "flat" when
printing a real world picture. This is caused by limitations of the printer
and how your eyes see such things. The best thing to do is to use several
of the reference pictures and color charts. (Print them without changing the
color data in the files)

For a color reference target to be useful for by eye monitor calibration,
you must have a digital picture file that represents the color swatches with
the correct RGB value. The Targets usually come with a data file that lists
these values. You can create the digital target picture file by scanning
the target, then changing the color swatches to the correct RGB color with a
decent photo editor.

When a consumer ink jet/bubblejet printer is setup correctly by eye for
picture printing, a reference grey scale may print with the lightest one or
two shades and the darkest two shades such that the dark shades seem to be
as black as the black shade, and the light shade just a bit darker or the
same as white. By default, out of the box, the Epson R300 series (as an
example) usually print the three or four darker shades of grey as black.
Paper brand and grade also makes a difference, since the papers take ink
differently. I've used Canon, Kodak, and Epson paper, to name three
sources. Each paper behaves a bit differently with the same printer
settings. As I remember it, the Canon paper prints with a slightly cooler
color balance than the Kodak paper. Some gloss paper types absorb the ink
differently than others- when you look at the printed areas at an angle, you
may see a duller area that looks as if some of the ink is on the surface.

Usually, a monitor can be adjusted to display the grey scale correctly,with
just a bit of difference between the darkest shade of grey and black, and a
visible difference however slight, between white and the lightest grey
shade.
 
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