Design and photography studios usually have a workhorse color printer in heavy use. Mostly used for comp layouts or quick proofs, these printers are seldom thought of as capable or accurate proofing devices. Until recently, no one expected to see a close match between a printout and artwork on screen because of differences in the devices and technologies.

Creative professionals are always surprised to learn that, with careful profiling and quality inks and paper, a relatively inexpensive color printer can get them further along in the proofing process than they imagined. The fact is, once you have all of your applications working in sync, you can save time and money by utilizing your color-managed studio printer as a proofer that rivals more expensive SWOP-certified devices. In this article I show you how to set up your applications and printer to achieve this.

What kind of printer should I use?
Color inkjets with four or more inks and color laser printers are some of the typical printers you see in just about every professional studio. In general, inkjet printers present more stable printing conditions with better quality inks and media, while color laser printers are the workhorses that handle heavy print loads with cheaper consumables. But both kinds of printers can be successfully incorporated into a color-managed workflow (see sidebar below). Furthermore, if you work in a photo lab or copy shop, your large-format photographic printer can also be used to proof CMYK printing.

Color laser printers as proofing devices
Son Do, cofounder and chief technician of Rods and Cones, Inc., has this advice about color laser printers and copiers in design studios: “It seems as if every studio we’ve been in has one of these. They’re ideal for the various kinds of printing that take place in a creative environment. Color laser technology is mature and renowned for oversaturated colors and the ‘PowerPoint’ look. Due to the way the technology works, these printers are not very stable, and their output should not be used for contractquality proofs. Having said this, if you carefully profile your laser printer, you’re likely to achieve results you can live with.

“A good profile for your color laser should show less saturated colors and flesh tones, while displaying even color transitions and gradations … in short, pleasing colors and better results. A good profile can give you prints that are 80- to 90-percent close to SWOP-certified proofs—which is great if you plan to keep the printer, and would like it to earn its keep in the studio.”

Do adds that most color laser printers come from the factory with a built-in PostScript RIP. So when profiling the printer, be sure to treat it as a CMYK printer, and choose the appropriate target and reference files.

Regardless of how you produce your printed proofs, you can perform your evaluation more accurately if you view both the print and the onscreen original under controlled conditions, as shown in the setup above. You can minimize the effects of ambient light with a hooded monitor and viewing booth (portable models like the one shown can fit in almost any design studio).

What’s in it for me?
Here are two things your studio printer can do to enhance your productivity:
   1. Make output colors from your studio printer match the colors you see on screen. This means less time and money spent on round after round of prints and wasted media. You can confidently make changes to the colors on screen and see consistent output.
   2. Simulate CMYK press output on your studio printer. This process will make your studio printer reproduce the compressed tonal scale and reduced color saturation you would expect to see in offset printing. While your inkjet printer or color laser might not be able to simulate all the printed characteristics of press output—particularly without additional software like a dedicated RIP—you will be able to show your client a closer simulation of final color, rather than a bright and saturated color print that will bear little resemblance to final output.

What am I going to need?
Here’s a checklist for successful matching:

• Color-savvy applications. Only applications that support ICC color management will give you the results you want. Such applications include those in Adobe’s Creative Suite and Quark XPress.
• Printer profiles. Obtain the highest quality printer profiles you can find. The better the profile describes your printer, the more accurate and reliable your proofing will be. For more on this subject, go to www.dynamicgraphics.com/webextras for exclusive online content, “Acquiring Custom Profiles for Your Printer.”
• Monitor profiles. Invest in a professional monitorprofiling package that will calibrate and profile your monitor accurately. See “Recommended resources,”.
• Adequate lighting and viewing conditions. Low ambient light works best when comparing prints to the onscreen preview. Our perception of color is influenced by the viewing environment, so it’s best to work with controlled lighting, ideally matching the D50 color temperature standard used in the industry. An invaluable asset for evaluating prints is a D50 viewing booth. These are available in freestanding and desktop models, and I particularly recommend models with dimming control, which can give you a better match to the overall brightness of your monitor screen. Again, see “Recommended resources,”.

Where do I start?
Before you begin, be sure to:

Calibrate your monitor correctly. The applications you’ll be working in convert colors from the printer’s profile to the monitor’s profile for onscreen display, so the monitor profile is an important component in this process. I recommend that you calibrate your monitor to a color temperature of 6500K and a target gamma of 2.2. This will ensure a clean appearance of whites and a tonal response curve that is easily matched by most studio printers. Plan to reprofile your LCD monitor monthly (older CRT monitors should be profiled every other week). This compensates for shifts in tones and colors. Name your profiles so you can easily distinguish one from another (see tip 1, below).

Tip 1:
Many people find it helpful to follow a naming convention for monitor profiles. Use a system that references the creation date and kind, such as “AppleCD_080306. icc.” This lets you identify the age and validity of the current profile very easily.

Correctly tag (embed) every piece of artwork with a profile. This tells the application how colors in the artwork are supposed to appear. It could be an input profile, such as a camera or scanner profile, or a device-independent color space profile like sRGB, Adobe RGB, or ColorMatch RGB. If your file is untagged, choose Edit > Assign Profile and choose an RGB color space such as Adobe RGB or ColorMatch RGB.

Am I ready to proof yet?
In this process, proofing consists of soft proofing and hard proofing. Soft proofing allows you to accurately preview your printed artwork on your monitor. Done correctly, this technique is so accurate that you can predict the effect of the inks on the specific paper you will use in your printer. All Adobe applications enable soft proofing in a similar fashion; we’ll use Photoshop CS2 to demonstrate. Within soft proofing, there are actually two steps:

Figure 1

A. Choose View > Proof Setup > Custom (see figure 1 above). Select a paper profile for your printer. Check Black Point Compensation to stretch the dynamic range of the image and generate crisp shadows. Check Simulate Paper Color to show how the colors will print on the paper stock. Check Preview and choose either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric as the Rendering Intent. (The Intent specifies how bright, saturated colors that exceed the printer’s gamut will be handled.) Choose the option that makes the image look its best, or choose Perceptual as a general choice for raster images. Click OK.

B. The colors in your artwork may appear less saturated than before, due to the fact that you’re previewing the image in a special mode. The title bar of the document will indicate the name of the profile you’re viewing; you can toggle the preview on and off by typing Command+Y (for Mac) or Control+Y (for PC). The best part is that you can perform any color corrections to the image while in this preview mode. See tips 2 and 3.

Tip 2:
You can tile multiple windows of the same document, with each window previewing a different paper profi le for your printer. These previews can show you at a glance which papers produce the best results. To create and tile multiple windows for a document, choose Window > Arrange > New Window. Do this a few more times. Next, choose Window > Arrange > Tile Horizontally/Vertically. Follow the directions in step A, at right, to set each document window to preview a different paper profile.

Tip 3:
Tip 3: When you open the Custom Proof Setup dialog, the default profile listed in the Device to Simulate menu is CMYK Web Coated (SWOP). To set the default to another profile, choose View > Proof Setup > Custom with no document open. Choose the printer profile you wish to make the default choice. Specify the Rendering Intent, check Black Point Compensation and Simulate Paper Color. Then Click OK. Now just type Command+Y or Control+Y each time you wish to preview an image with this profile.

Figure 2a (Photoshop CS2)	Figure2b (Photoshop CS)

Now for the second step, hard (or print) proofing: This is when you print the image using the print settings shown in figures 2a (Photoshop CS2) and 2b (Photoshop CS) above. Choose File > Print with Preview. Click More Options and choose Color Management in the pop-up menu. In the Print section, choose Document, which will show you the source profile. In the Options section, choose Let Photoshop Determine Colors in the Color Handling menu and the printer profile you’re soft proofing. Choose the same Rendering Intent as in step A and check Black Point Compensation. Then click Print.

When you print, it’s essential to turn off color management in the print driver, which ensures that you don’t apply color management twice (figure below). You will usually find an option to do this in the Color Management/Handling section of the print driver software. Finally, be sure to choose the correct paper setting, such as Matte, Glossy, etc., before printing the document.

Figure 3

At last it’s time to evaluate your print and compare it to the onscreen preview. Inkjet prints need time for the colors to stabilize—about 20 minutes or so. Colors in laser prints set almost immediately. It’s helpful to dim the ambient light or at least keep harsh overhead lighting from washing over the monitor screen and viewing area. Compare the print to the image on screen while soft proofing the same printer profile and settings that were used to print the file. Be sure you’ve checked Simulate Paper Color to preview the color of your chosen stock on screen.

If you’ve followed all the preceding steps carefully— and factor in the basic differences in devices and technology—you’ll end up with a print that closely matches the image on screen.

So, how do I preview press color on my studio printer?
Here comes the second form of proofing you can do with your studio printer. Sometimes referred to as cross-rendering or cross-simulation, it can be thought of as a mathematical equation that maps colors anticipated in the final output onto the gamut of your studio printer.

But … for it to work, the gamut of your studio printer must exceed the gamut of the final output press. Luckily, most inkjets and color lasers work well for this purpose. To get the closest match, consider using paper that matches the color and texture of the stock you’ll be using on press. Some paper manufacturers make inkjet papers for proofing, although you will need to use a custom profile for this paper in your printer.

Figure 4

Tip 4:
If you use a desktop viewing booth for proofing, be sure to position the viewing booth at a 90° angle to the monitor screen. This position forces you to turn your head in order to compare the screen preview to the print in the viewing booth. This lets your eyes adapt to the different white points on both devices, and will result in a more objective color analysis.

A. For this proof, you set up soft proofing a bit differently than before (see figure 5 right). Choose View > Proof Setup > Custom. Choose a profile for the final output, such as a press or proofer profile, or a reference profile such as U.S. Web Coated (SWOP). Select a rendering intent and check Black Point Compensation. If you choose an option other than the Working CMYK profile, click Save and name your custom proof setup. Then click OK.

B. Choose File > Print with Preview. In the Print section, choose Proof and verify that it displays the profile you just chose. In the Options section, choose Let Photoshop Determine Colors and select your printer’s profile. In the Proof Setup Preset menu, choose the profile for the final output you just selected or the custom proof setup you saved. Check Simulate Paper Color and click Print (figure 5 right).

This technique performs multiple color conversions, where colors in the image are first converted to the press profile, then to the profile of your studio printer. The colors converted by the press profile are also converted to your monitor profile for previewing onscreen. The resulting proof is best evaluated under controlled lighting in the manner described earlier. You should end up with a carefully crafted proof that mimics the colors and tonal range of the final output on press.

Thanks to Erica Aitken and Son Do of Rods and Cones, Inc., for field advice. Coming up: In the next issue, I’ll share professional techniques for performing a crucial step in any color-managed workflow: color correction.

Recommended resources
Books:
• Real World Color Management, by Bruce Fraser, $49.99, Peachpit Press

• Understanding Color Management, by Abhay Sharma, $66.95, Thomson Delmar Learning

Monitor profiling packages:
• Eye-One Display 2, by GretagMacbeth, $249

• Monaco OPTIX XR, by X-Rite, $249

• There are less costly options, but these two models provide professional capability.

Viewing accessories:
Controlled lighting provides an objective, consistent way to evaluate material.

• SoLux lamps: These simulate daylight and are available in various configurations at various prices.

• Viewing booths: GTI Graphic Technology and JUST Normlicht produce viewing booths in large and small sizes.

Printer & other device profiling packages: These include all software and hardware required to create quality profiles for RGB and CMYK color printers, monitors, scanners, digital cameras, and projectors.

• Eye-One Design, by GretagMacbeth

• Pulse ColorElite System, by X-Rite

About the author
Rita Amladi is the owner of Orion Arts & Communications, a digital imaging training and consulting company. She is a Certified Technical Trainer and an Adobe Certified Trainer for Photoshop. She teaches classes on Photoshop and topics such as color scanning and digital capture, color correction, digital special effects, and production techniques for print and web art. Her latest training CD is ICC Color Management in Photoshop 7 from Virtual Training Company.