Common Questions on Digital Photography

One of the most commonly asked questions regarding digital photography are why don't the colors on my screen and the color of the print out of the same image match, even to a decent extent. Well there is nothing wrong in it. Your monitor is absolutely fine and so is your printer. There is nothing wrong with your digicam either. The reason behind such a phenomena is the fact that your monitor and your printer use two completely different techniques. One uses the phenomena of illumination and the other color mixing to produce an image signal for your brain.

Your monitor uses display colors while the printers mix colors from inks, these are two different processes and hence produce two different results. Even the monitor displays different colors in different types of light. For instance, there is more of a bluish shade in your image in daylight whereas an incandescent light gives them a more reddish tinge.

So what to do now?
Now that we all know that we cannot get the picture perfect prints out of our photographs, let us aim for the near perfect image. While taking the printout our aim should be to eliminate the purple skin tones or any undesired colors (unless you really want them to be there). To do this just transfer the images from your digicam to your computer and open them using Adobe Photoshop (or any other imaging software that you may have):

Now take look at them. Do they look more of a bluish color? Alternatively, more of reddish? Well just, go to your color management settings and make it a little more of red if it looks more bluish or vice versa. Keep changing the color until they are neutralized. Use the preview option if you are using Adobe. This helps in saving a lot of time rather always going back and using the "undo' function.

What next?
Well now that you have done a lot of fiddling with the image on your monitor, it is time to get to the real thing. Just go ahead and take a print out of the image on your monitor. Your reaction most probably would be this doesn't look like the one on my screen. Well this was bound to happen. Wasn't it?

Well now all that you have to do is to analyze this image and see what color is needs to be added to make it look more neutralized. Make some changes and take another print out. This also may or may not be what you want, but it'll probably be a reasonably acceptable print.

If you are still not satisfied, you may still do the same color changing again but one way or the other you'll have to settle for a print, which is not exactly like the image on your screen. So just keep the settings of the most acceptable color scheme instead of wasting paper and the printer ink trying for that never perfect print.

Don't be depressed that your pictures are not worth what you where searching for they are like this because they have to be like this. Let's hope some technology of the future helps us to print the picture perfect. Until then it's going to be like this. So don't stop. Keep clicking and keep printing. Remember the resolution plays a large role in determining the image quality. Therefore, read up on the resolution to get the pictures you deserve. Oh, and by the way, don't forget those little dots known as pixels, since these too play a chief role in how your pictures will appear.

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