Color Management

[nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net]

----- Mail original -----
De: "Martin Kaffanke"

Hi,

> Is there a way to make colors on the display looking the same as on the printer, by
> printing a Page and compare the screen on sight? 

That's not really useful, unless you never intend to use your pictures with any other printer or screen (ie never share them with someone else, never use them once the printer or screen dies and need replacing)

What you usually want is to calibrate both the screen and the printer against an ideal color target.

The first one is quite easy nowadays – buy a color probe compatible with argyllcms, launch gnome color manager, let it display hundreds of color patches and compute a color correction profile. You need minimal screen quality for that – no correction will salvage a screen with little color depth or too strong a color drift (read hardware reviews, some reviewers do test screen colorimetry)

I suspect the second one can get quite expensive, if only because lighting a few pixels is a lot faster than getting some ink on paper and probing the result (also, you need different color sensors for screens and paper, many color probes only work with the first device class, and anything but professional paper and ink will probably change from batch to batch). Unless you really want to calibrate your own hardware, I'd suggest to leave this part to professional printers once you've proofed your files on a calibrated screen.

You can probably approximate printer calibration by comparing prints to a calibrated screen display. IIRC you can also buy expensive pre-printed color targets, which are waranted to have stable accurate colors that won't shift with time.