SmilePix Tip: Printing

"The photo looks great on the monitor, but the print looks too light?" Another version of this is the print could look too dark. One reason for the discrepancy is that colors are created differently for a monitor and a print. Think of a monitor as a slide. When we look at a slide the light is passing through it and the colors look vibrant. In a print, we are looking at colors being reflected from the paper and the colors may look quite different than the slide. The monitor will see a larger range of colors than those that can be reproduced on paper.

Adjust the Monitor for Printing

If you want to have predictable print results, adjust the monitor to match the print. Set the printer to its default settings and make a test print. Under normal room light, view the print next to the monitor and use the controls for brightness and contrast on the front of the monitor to make the monitor look as close as possible to the print.

The best printers for printing photos are the six-color printers. The colors of the ink are black, yellow, magenta, cyan, light magenta and light cyan. The best print paper to use is a glossy photo paper made by the printer maker (i.e. for Epson printers use Epson papers, for HP printer use HP papers, etc).

Each company makes papers to match their printer, so using papers from another company will often give you prints that do not look very good.

Trying to save money by using third party papers will also bring disappointment in the quality of the prints. If you are willing to put in the time to calibrate the paper to the printer to the monitor, third party papers can be used, but the easiest results are from the papers made by the printer company. Plug-and-play is what most of us are looking for from our computer equipment. So the best advice is to Keep It Simple.