What you see on screen might not be what you get when you print! Why? All monitors display the colors and brightness differently. Your monitor and the software for your monitor has all kinds of settings. I am guessing many users leave the default settings and just use the monitor as is, but this might explain the screen vs print difference. If you start digitally editing your images, like adjusting the lighting or color, the settings of your monitor are very important. Your goal is to calibrate your monitor to display similar to what is printed. But how?
The professionals do this with calibration devices, but as a home user I am not going to spend $100 or $200 on a device to calibrate the monitor. In many cases, this is more than the monitor is worth itself! Another way is very technical and uses color profiles, but again this is probably going way too in-depth for the home user. The easiest and most cost-efficient way to calibrate your monitor is to print a few prints and adjust your settings so that monitor is displaying similar to what is printed.
Get some Test Prints:
When you choose your images to print they should have these characteristics:
- bright, various colors
- skin tones
- range of blacks to white
You can also find calibration prints online. I chose a print from SmugMug that is a calibration print. By doing a calibration print, I am only paying for one print to get all the above requirements. I have also found that the same image printed from different companies (or home printer) are all slightly differently. Choose the place that you will use in the future for most of your photo printing, and print your test calibration prints there.
Adjust Settings on your Monitor:
Once you have your calibration prints in hand, hold them up to the monitor and start adjusting the settings. I would start with your monitor’s settings (dig out your monitor’s manual to find out how.) I have brightness, contrast, & color settings on my monitor. Some monitors have modes or profiles that you can choose. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t know what they mean, just play with the settings to start getting something similar to what is on print. And most monitors also come with the option to return back to factory default if things go really wrong!
The second place where you can adjust your monitors settings is with the software. Where to look for this software depends on your monitor and video hardware. If you right click on your desktop and choose Personalize (This is on Vista.) and choose Display Settings you might find a few things here to change. In addition, your monitor or your video card might have come with software. You will have to read your helps/manuals on your particular computer to see what software you have. When I right click on desktop and choose Personalize, I get NVidia Control Panel that came with my video card that allows me to fine tune my display settings.
Some tips:
- As you play with your software display settings, you might have to go back to your monitor settings and adjust slightly.
- Your monitor can produce a more pure white & pure black image than a print ever can.
- Your monitor will display the image brighter than the printed photo.
- Get as close as you can but you may never get the true color. Be aware of the difference when you edit and think about upgrading your monitor if you want to do a lot of image editing. I have a dual monitor display, an older LCD monitor and recent LCD monitor. I have never been able to get my old LCD monitor to the display settings I really want. So when I edit images, I am always editing on my new LCD monitor display. Eventually, I will upgrade my old LCD monitor and get more true color.
- If you are still using an old large CRT monitor, consider upgrading to LCD Monitor. Besides having a better image quality, you will gain a considerable amount of desk space back!
