How to Match Monitor Colour with Adobe Photoshop 7

[jopenner]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to configure my Samsung monitor to shows colours the way they should look once they are printed out in Adobe Photoshop 7.0.
Can someone tell me how this is done?
I have created graphic images (RGB) that look great on my monitor, but look totally different once printed out i.e. rich blues look more like purple on printout.
Thanks.

John

[DaemonCollector]

There are tools that will sit on your monitor and look at the color and help you configure the colors, but those are expensive. I use Nokia Monitor Tester to tweak my color and brightness, that should get it close. If you google for it you'll find it.

[mahuti]

How to achieve color accuracy...the age-old question.

Good luck with those rich blues. Always a nightmare. Even for professionals that (sort-of) know what they're doing.

If you are using your home printer (or even a print house) I'd suggest printing a page with a bunch of swatches of your rich blue colors that vary differently in shade, saturation, etc. Whichever looks closest to what you want... use that, instead of what your monitor is telling you is correct.  Working within the limitations of your ouput unit is sometimes easier / better / more reliable than technology to correct the problem.

You can try to calibrate your monitor with tools, but I've never found them to be accurate enough. You might be able to tweak your settings to work with one printer, but every time you output to a different unit, you'll need to recalibrate to that unit. Some caveats to all of this, of course... it all depends on your budget, equipment, and requirements.

I've always had better luck working against the values from a "known correct" sample, especially when I'm working with rich blues.

Printing issues... the #1 reason that I switched to web design.

[jopenner]

Good advise.  I'll give that a whirl.
Thanks.

John

[patrickl]

Some printers will give you a icc-profile to use for their equipment. I find that the prints I get with a profiled printer match pretty closely to my profiled monitor. The printer profile will immediately show which colors will change most drastically. The printer profile is probably more important than the monitor profile btw.

Especially for photo's this works pretty well, but for artwork (with not too many different colors) I tend to use's mahiti's technique as well. Just print the swatches till I find something I like and use that. Sometimes it takes me ages to find the right swatch, but still. A printer profile can help with that too.

[RayB]

I say that you can't.
There are too many variances between both monitors and printers. Especially if you have a typical cheap printer.

[mahuti]

Right... so work against the bad match... work with actual printed samples.

ICC profiles are a definite help, if you impliment them correctly.