Color profile on monitors?
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- freedom
Do you ever adjust the color profile on your monitor when dealing with printers and no using Pantones?
- sted4
Yes.
- monNom0
No.
Just for clarity. There are two profiles to consider for printing. Your monitor profile is the adjustments to the RGB signal from your computer to account for variations in the monitors ability to represent colours. If your monitor can't reproduce the signal exactly, it will be transformed with a set of curves to most closely replicate a neutral signal. Ie. If your monitor is too red, the profile curves will reduce the amount of red in the output signal to accomodate.
A printer profile is the same, but for the printer's output. It takes a neutral signal. In this case CMYK, and applies curves to it to get the printer's output as close as possible to the neutral input.
You don't change your monitor. Once it's profiled you leave it alone (re profile occasional to account for drift). You apply a printer profile to your files at time of output so they come out correctly on a particular device. They are specific to each printer.
Pantone colours don't really need to be profiled as they are inks mixed to a known formula before they go on the press. You use them because you know exactly how they'll come out compared to the mixture of CMYK, which might tend to shift in colour.
- The greatest example where you will learn why this isn't true is when you try to replicate CMYK gold. (it will fail af if your display isn't calibrated at all)sted
- That's why we have standards like FOGRA, so that you can adjust your minitor to that color profile.sted
- That's a print profile. Your software might try to mimic how it looks when printed, but you aren't changing your monitor profile (sRGB/aRGB colour space)monNom
- that's the whole point of creating a proper Display profile, to get close as possible to the standard print profiles. for example fogra39.sted
- as in my example that cmyk gold replica will be perfect on your screen but when it gets printed out (with the standard profile) it's going to be probably green.sted
- now if you aren't familiar with the CMYK colour space the best thing what you can do is to calibrate the display, and you will see the difference.sted
- Now I'm actually more confused than I was before I opened this thread because of reading this and the comments here.monospaced
- freedom0
Thanks fellas.