MATCHING SCREEN IMAGE TO PRINT

There are many tutorials and sources of advice on tackling the perennial problem of getting printed images to match the image on the computer screen. In my photography I have probably tried all of the methods, mostly using a combination of Hue and Saturation, Color Balance and Curves layers in the Soft Proof viewing (Duplicate image and then viewing side by side go to View-Proof Setup-Custom and inserting the printer/paper profile to see how the print will look).

Now, in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS6 we can take the image and convert the screen profile to the printer/paper profile and I find this works every time without all of the tweaking and tuning that I previously had to do.

How do we do this.  First we should have the basic requirements in place; that is the monitor properly calibrated (I use the Spyder2Express) and have an ICC color profile for the type of printer and paper (I have an Epson R2880 printer and the ICC profiles come with the software for Epson papers or other paper suppliers will provide ICC profiles free of charge, as with Permajet, the other papers I use)

Now take this image.

I want to print to the Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper. If I Soft Proof the image as in these two captions the appearance dulls down. In other words the printer reads the image in accordance with the color profile it uses, which may have different color readings to the workspace used in Photoshop.

You can see that the workspace used is shown in the bottom left corner and is Adobe RGB (1998). We want to convert it to the RGB readings of the printer profile. To do this go to the Eyedropper tool from the menu on the left set it to the Color Sampler tool and a Sample Size of 5x5 in order to pick up a good sample. Now pick up four points by holding down the Shift Key and clicking around the image; pick points that give a spread of contrast and color in the image. We should see the RGB readings for each of these points in the Info box to the right of the screen.

We convert the profile by going to Edit–Convert to Profile and in the dialog box, which comes up, insert the printer/paper profile where it says Device to Simulate.  Other settings are as shown.  Click OK. Note that in the two pictures below the RGB readings have changed, but the image has not, when the Convert to Profile dialog box comes up and is ready for conversion. 

Click OK in the Convert to Profile dialog box and then Print the image in the usual way as shown.

So far this is the best method I have found for matching screen colors and contrast to the print.