Colour Management

The term ‘colour management’ refers to controlled conversions between the colour representations of devices such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, printers, offset presses and other corresponding media.

If you sent your digital image to a printer without colour management, it is unlikely your final print would match your screen. You might find washed out or unnatural colours, or missing detail in highlights or shadows. Colour management can prevent this disappointment by using soft proof profiles to predict colour shifts, and printer profiles to convert the working colour space of your file to the Colourspace of the printer.

Within our Lambda printing services, Metro’s technicians will colour manage your images as part of the process. But if you’re using one of our Kiosk or Online printing services, you’ll need to understand some basic principles of colour management. In addition to Colour management, please refer to our File information in Technical help for these services.

To help you out, we've put our heads together and come up with some short step-by-step guides to the techniques you need to succeed with digital printing. Remember – we are always happy to help - if you are not confident about these processes, please contact our knowledgeable staff for help and advice.

Viewing colour and tone onscreen

How can you make sure the colours you're seeing on your screen are accurate?

1. Don’t let stray light fall onto the screen - set your monitor up in a neutrally lit space, with no bright sources of light reflecting off the screen or beaming into your eyes from behind
2. Regularly clean your monitor screen – it’s surprising how quickly a film of dust can collect, give it a once over on a weekly basis
3. Use a medium-grey neutral desktop background.
4. Degauss your screen weekly, and always before calibrating your monitor – this is usually an option on the control panel on the monitor, although some monitors always degauss themselves when first powered up.

Calibrating your monitor

1. We recommend you calibrate your monitor with a spectrophotometer device such as a Gretag Macbeth Eye One Display or similar. This inexpensive little gadget comes with full instructions and will perform tests on your screen to determine the output.
2. Adjust your monitor settings to match ours:
   
   White point - 6500K
   Gamma for PC and Mac - 2.2
   
   
3. If you work with digital images regularly, it is worth calibrating your screen at least every two weeks, also whenever you have to move your computer to a new working area.
4. (Optional) Compare a test print side-by-side with its on-screen image using a product such as the Kodak Colour Management Check-up Kit for a final check of colour, tone and light source.

Using the correct Colour Working Space

For the best result, create your image file with a proven ICC-managed colour workflow system. These instructions will help you change your settings to our recommended working space in Photoshop:

1. Edit > Color Settings>Europe Prepress defaults
2. We use the Adobe RGB (1998) workspace for all Lambda C-Types prints.
3. If you are working in CMYK, you will need to convert your image to RGB
   
   Image>Mode>RGB