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Типография Триада-М Profiling of printers

Have you noticed that your favorite photo, which looks bright and vibrant on your monitor, turns out to be completely different when printed on a printer? For example, the blue sky turns purple, and the asphalt turns greenish, shades in dark areas are lost or glare appears on the image, etc. First of all, the user wants the image on his monitor to match the print on the printer. Although this is quite possible to achieve, let's still first try to figure it out: how will this photo look on another monitor, or its print on another printer? After all, they are all different ... And most importantly, it is absolutely not clear which of these devices (monitor or printer) reproduces this particular color more correctly? Which one to trust more?
Типография Триада-М
Both a monitor and a printer, like any other color reproducing device, have their own color gamut (color gamut) - the range of colors that this device is physically capable of reproducing. The color gamuts of two different devices can be completely different, and the color gamut on both devices can only be accurately reproduced in the range where these gamuts intersect. Thus, any color that can be printed on a printer can be correctly displayed on a monitor only if the monitor's gamut is greater than or equal to that of the printer. And vice versa: it is possible to correctly print any color displayed on the monitor on the printer only if the color gamut of the printer is greater than or equal to the gamut of this monitor.
In reality, in addition to those colors that both the monitor and the printer can display correctly, most often there are also those colors that the printer can correctly reproduce, but the monitor cannot correctly reproduce and vice versa. To understand this better, you can visually compare the color gamuts of 2 devices, in this case a specific monitor and printer.
In turn, any photograph in digital form on your computer, in fact, is a set of dots (pixels) of different colors, which together also form their own color gamut of this photograph. This gamut is limited to the gamut of the profile color space that must be assigned to any digital image. If a digital image is not assigned a color profile, then it is impossible to say exactly what color each pixel has. the boundaries of the working color space are unknown, i.e. it is not clear what color is 100% red (for example) in this photo. Therefore, you should always ALWAYS embed the color profile in the image!
Most often, when preparing photos, the sRGB color space is used, which, in fact, has become the de facto standard. But its color gamut may not be enough if your printer is capable of printing brighter ... Therefore, you need to choose a working profile for digital photos depending on the capabilities of your equipment and the desired result. In order to completely “control” the color on your equipment, you need the monitor's gamut to have a larger working color space and a larger printer gamut!
Only in this case can you get a predictable color in any situation, because a calibrated monitor can always act as a color swatch. Therefore, before wondering about calibrating the printer, it is imperative to first calibrate the monitor, even if it is not professional or has a narrow color gamut.
Типография Триада-М

Now about profiling the printer. It makes sense to carry out this procedure only if the printing device is stable over time, i.e. the same image with the same settings will be guaranteed to print the same over a long period of time. Good or bad - in this case it doesn't matter, the main thing is the same.

Print stability is more important for electrographic (laser) printers. For example, there are printers that even have built-in “intelligent” algorithms that are designed to stabilize the print quality depending on external conditions, but in reality they are not only unable to do this, but are themselves a factor of instability. are triggered automatically when the printer is turned on. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a predictable color on such devices.

Inkjet printers are more stable in printing, but at the same time, more demanding on paper. Their color gamut is highly dependent on paper type, ink and print quality settings. Therefore, the profile is built only after fixing these parameters. It will be relevant only if printing will be performed continuously with the same settings, on the same paper and the same ink. If you need to use several types of paper or settings, then, most often, you need to make your own profile for each type.

Separately, it should be said about paper. Manufacturers of paper, including paper for inkjet printing, to improve whiteness (especially of its cheap grades) often add a special component to the composition - fluorescent optical brightener (OPB). This additive allows the yellowish paper to appear whiter due to the luminescence effect. In this case, the absorption of light energy from the near ultraviolet region of light, which the human eye practically does not perceive, and the emission of this energy in the form of light in the blue visible part of the spectrum. Thus, the paper turns blue due to invisible ultraviolet radiation, as a result of which the human eye perceives yellowish paper as white.

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This relatively inexpensive method of bleaching paper has its drawbacks. First, the perception of color on a print on such paper depends very much on lighting, more precisely, on the presence and amount of the ultraviolet component in it. Therefore, under different lighting conditions, the color of the print can vary significantly and unpredictably, depending on the properties and amount of FOF added by the paper manufacturer. Secondly, the sensitivity of the device that is used to measure color (spectrophotometer) in the near ultraviolet region is much higher than the capabilities of the human eye, and it will not work to “deceive” it in this way with the help of the OOF: the device will still “see” such paper as yellowish. Therefore, after “normal” profiling, all colors on such paper will have a parasitic (most often bluish or greenish) tint, which is very clearly visible “by eye” in neutral gray tones, where the sensitivity of human vision to color deviations is highest.

There are ways to compensate for the influence of the OLF through the use of various algorithms that are developed empirically. But due to the fact that the nature of such effects is due to the addition of OLF, the amount and chemical composition of which each paper manufacturer keeps secret, these algorithms do not always give a satisfactory result. In addition, a color profile with such compensation must be done separately for each light source under which these prints will be viewed.

Profiling of any printer can be performed with the visit of a specialist in the city of Khmelnytsky or in our office (you will need to bring the printer to our office with all the cables that are used to connect it). In the second case, your monitor is not calibrated, and you can evaluate the quality of the printer profiling work on a calibrated monitor in our office.