1) Use a calibrated monitor in a dim room
“I’ve tried printing a few photos but they always come out so much darker than my monitor and the colors don’t look right!”
Does that describe your experience with printing at all?
If you want to create a print that closely resembles the photo you see on your screen, you absolutely must use a calibrated monitor. This ensures that you are seeing accurate colors and brightness in your photos.
First off, you should be using a monitor that has adjustable controls for brightness, color temperature, and gamma. Ideally you also want one that reproduces 100% of the AdobeRGB and sRGB color spaces, as these are the most common color spaces used by printers and print labs.
Once you have a decent monitor, there are two ways you can calibrate it: the quick and dirty method, and the hardware method.
QUICK AND DIRTY METHOD: Using your home photo printer or a print lab, print around 5 photos that each display a variety of colors. Compare those prints to the photos as you see them on your computer, then use your monitor’s color and brightness controls to make the monitor look as close to the prints as possible. This process will help your next prints match more closely. I used this technique for years and got surprisingly great results from it.
HARDWARE METHOD: A more accurate method is to use an external calibration device like a DataColor Spyder or Calibrite DisplayPlus. These tools will measure the colors your screen is displaying and compare them to the known standard version of the colors. Then they will create a monitor calibration profile that your computer will use to adjust the colors it displays so that they’re as close to ideal as possible. This way when you’re editing, it helps ensure that the colors you see will be closely matched to the colors that your printer creates. We will talk more about this proofing process in the next articles.
Best practice: edit in a dark room
Not only should you be using a calibrated monitor, but for the best possible results you should be editing in a dim room with consistent, even lighting. This is because the ambient light levels where you are editing will affect your perception of the photos you see on your monitor. For example, if you are editing in a super bright room, you will very likely need to increase the brightness of your monitor so that you can see it better. But this means that your prints may turn out much darker by comparison.
