William Robb wrote:
If the print doesn't match the screen image, then you can adjust the printer driver until a match has been accomplished, usually in a few small prints.
But that's what I'm trying to avoid... maybe I don't get it. I can stomach doing adjustments to the image as seen on the monitor, but once I get it 'right' on the monitor, I want the print to be a 'best match'. Otherwise it's purely guesswork about how to make the monitor image look 'wrong' so that it prints 'right'. That's why I haven't been doing many prints of my own... it takes forever. It seems that I have to do this everytime I make a print, not just once in a while.
A lot of the stuff that is out there, such as monitor calibrators, are inventions of computer people who don't have a clue about what they are doing, and so insist on taking a paint by numbers approach to the problem of matching print to screen.
I can understand that simply calibrating a monitor doesn't mean a hill of beans, if the printer doesn't know what the monitor has been calibrated to. So it seems the monitor calibration part alone may be of little value. I thought... have been reading... that some of this software also generates a printer profile that matches the monitor, and that is how the color match between display and print is achieved.
Colorvision has something called PrintFix. Included is a software calibration chart for each printer model. You print the chart on the desired paper with the printer. You then read the printed chart into their supplied patch reader device, and it's supposed to match the printer profile to the monitor profile. If the monitor is calibrated to the target and the printer is calibrated to the target, they'll alledgedly match.
I'm probably preaching to the choir here... any comments? Thanks.
Tom C.
