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it seems so simple. The photo looks great on your computer screen. That special fine-art paper you bought is just awesome. you hit print and disappointment. what happened? printmaking is a dance between printer, paper and computer. for the best performance, you need to channel your inner Bob fosse.

Your computer uses a colour engine, either built into the operating system or from another source, like the Adobe Color Engine (ACE). The colour engine works with a vast theoretical colour model. Its job is to manage the colours coming into and going out of the computer so that they remain as consistent as possible, regardless of where the file ends up. It needs to do this because the input sources like your camera and the output destinations like your monitor and printer have their own way of interpreting colour. Each also has limits to the range of colours it can express.

A couple of decades ago Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft set out to solve this problem and came up with Standard RGB, or sRGB. It’s still with us today and remains central to most consumer electronics, computing and the Internet. Serving as a generic onesize-fits-all standard, sRGB ensures good colour without the need to calibrate every consumer product on the planet that works with colour. 

Good is no longer good enough for many printmakers, however. The colour gamut (or range) defined by sRGB is proving to be too small for the latest imaging devices. Early inkjet printers used four ink colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Today’s photo inkjets add variations of these as separate inks (typically light cyan, light magenta, and one or two lighter shades of grey). Some even have separate inks for primary and secondary colours (red and green, for example). This not only means you get more vibrant and saturated colours, but also the ability to express differences of hue better, often edging beyond the colour gamut of sRGB. Likewise Raw-format images captured by modern cameras exceed the gamut of sRGB. The take-away from this would seem straightforward: if you want to preserve more of the data captured in the Raw file, incorporate a wide-gamut colour space into your workflow. There are settings in Raw-processing utilities or workflow products like Adobe Lightroom that let you select a wide-gamut colour space such as ProPhoto RGB for your working environment. This is a good practice for printmakers.

There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind though. First, wide-gamut colour in itself isn’t synonymous with better colour. What a big colour space allows is more flexibility in adjustments and fine-tuning. 

Second, some of the colour data in a Raw image will be beyond the capability of your monitor to display or your printer to print. These are known as out-of-gamut colours. Under most conditions you don’t know what they are; out-of-gamut colours don’t announce themselves on your monitor or print as blank areas. That’s because one of the jobs of the colour engine is to take those out-ofgamut colours and come up with the closest match that the device in question can handle. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could see the out-of-gamut colours to determine where the potential colour problems were? Enter soft proofing. Most image editors and workflow suites support soft proofing. The soft-proofing module displays a version of the image

that’s been adjusted to simulate what it would look like on a different device in the present context, what it would look like as an inkjet print.

One of the benefits of soft proofing is that out-of-gamut colours can be highlighted, so you can take steps to make adjustments to the image to bring more colours into the range that can be printed.

To create the simulation, the soft proofer uses the paper profiles stored in your computer. When you install a printer, typically a number of paper profiles are also installed. As well, most papers geared to fine photography have profiles you can download. Profiles hold specific instructions that tell the printer how to deposit the ink, taking into account properties of the paper such as the surface finish, texture and whiteness of the paper itself. 

When you use soft proofing, you start to see the differences in how papers are able to receive an image. A soft proof of one paper may show few problems while another may be flashing out-of-gamut warnings all over the place. When preparing images for printing, paper is the X variable. Editing your image so that it

looks “puuurfect” on your monitor only gets you partway there and, in some cases, gives you a false sense that you’ve nailed the look you’re aiming for. Soft proofing is a useful technique for closing that gap

between what you want and what you get. Of course soft proofing is just a simulation. To get the true picture, you’ll need to turn to hard proofing actually making a test print with the paper you’ve chosen. Selecting paper can be chore, but there are broad principles and a wealth of information available from paper manufacturers and independent sources. Some papers lend themselves to certain kinds of images and have thus become safe choices glossy for high impact, lustre for portraits, matte for landscape. But these are starting points, not rules. The broad range of inkjet paper available today means there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is monitor calibration. Consider it part of the minimum baseline for quality print - making. If you can’t trust the accuracy of your monitor, all bets are off for predictability elsewhere in the colour chain. Monitor settings are also implicated in another common problem: brightness mismatches between the onscreen image and the printed photo. If you use your computer for other things like word

processing or Web surfing, there’s a good chance that you have the brightness control turned up. This can give you false information about the tonal distribution. Since the printer doesn’t have a brightness knob, it prints the image according to the data it receives  accurately, but darker than you might have expected. Some applications,Lightroom, for example, have a “brighten for print” setting that you can select to compensate for this.