Color Matching 101

Okay folks, let’s talk color management and printed images. I may tend to get a bit long winded, so please bear with me, as we want to make sure that you get the best results on all of your printed items.

First off, color management is not a precise science. The colors that you see on your computer monitor cannot be perfectly reproduced by any printer on the market today due to several reasons

The human eye can perceive colors in a wider gamut (range) than a printer can produce, and in fact, the same exact image can look different from person to person, so what you see on screen can appear off from the same image after it’s been printed.
An image will look different printed on paper than it will printed on canvas, or fabric, or vellum, or vinyl, etc. so there are several variables that will make it look different than what you see on your screen
An identical image can vary in how it looks on your monitor compared to any other monitor due to differences in resolution settings, calibrations that may have been performed to adjust color, different manufacturers of the monitors, and so on…
Similar to the above, the same image will look different if it is printed on an Epson printer, than it would printed on a Canon, HP, Roland, or any other due to the variance in inks.
Images displayed on-screen will usually appear more saturated and bold than they possibly could if they are reproduced by ink on fabric, or paper, etc.

Sooo, now that you know a bit about the “why’s” of printed vs. displayed colors, we need to work on the “how’s”. How to prepare our image files to get the closest color match we can to our printed items. That’ll be the topic of our next post on color management. See ya soon!

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