4 Install one or more device profiles for your monitor

Right-click on your desktop > Properties > Settings > Advanced
Color Management > Select Add (a window opens listing available profiles)

Profiles usually have unhelpful file names. Right-click a file name and select Properties to see what device a profile is for.  It may take some trial and error to find the right one. There may be more than one profile for your monitor, for example for different White Point settings.

Now install one for your printer
Windows Start Settings Printers

• Right-click on the printer for which you want to install a profile.
• Select Properties and go to the Color Management tab.
• Press Add to select a profile.
• Right-click for Properties as before.

• Basic color management not Proofing
• Monitor Profile load the profile for your monitor, making sure it is the one for your current monitor settings.
• Printer Profileload the profile for your printer, making sure it is the correct one for the resolution and paper you are using.
• Rendering Intent: set to "Perceptual" or, if that is not a choice, set it to "Picture".

 Device profiles
Device profiles are files with the .ICM file extension and usually live in the:
WINDOWS SYSTEM COLOR folder

   Can't find a profile for your device?

1. Look for it on any CD that may have come with your device
2. Look for it on the manufacturer's web site
3. Contact theTechnical Support Department of your manufacturer

You may be able to get reasonable results by loading "sRGB Color Space Profile.icm".
You must have a device profile for your printer for Color Management to be of any help

• Windows requires the device to be the currently active device before its profile can be loaded in the PSP Color Management Dialog.
• Thus, if you have several printers configured on your system make sure you set the printer of interest as the default before you try to set up Color Management in PSP.
• Laptop owners who also use a docking station may have to set up Color Management separately for the LCD screen (when undocked) and for the monitor (when docked).
• Even though you have set up Color Management everywhere, it still might not work because the printer driver has not been told to use it. To avoid this problem press the Properties button in the PSP Print dialog and explore the driver settings. (You may need to select custom settings.) Make sure that Color Management is enabled and set to use the ICM profile. (ICM stands for Image Color Management.)

If you don't have Color Management available, the alternative is to experiment with the printer driver settings until you find some that give a good match between monitor and screen. These settings can be accessed by pressing the Properties button in the File > Print dialog.

Check with your monitor manufacturer for drivers:
ICM profiles are usually bundled with the driver and not accessible as a stand-alone file.
Search for your driver rather than profiles.  Possible source to check for monitor profiles.

If those results aren't good, you can use the FCC's page to get the name an address of the Grantee. I think the Grantee is always the manufacturer, but I'm not positive.  A Google search with the Product code and the grantee name might turn up something that the first searches didn't. In this particular case it wasn't helpful. - Bob Dietz

The problem with color is that different devices make it in different ways. Monitors produce light by exciting red-, blue- and green-emitting phosphors by bombarding them with an electron beam. This is called additive color. For instance, full intensity red, green and blue combine to give white.

Printers use subtractive color. Light scattered from the paper makes it look white. Ink on the paper subtracts or absorbs certain colors and the remaining ones bounce off the paper back at you. For example, if the ink subtracts cyan and magenta, yellow is what you see. It also means that if you change the lighting white will look more yellowish or more bluish and if you print on pink paper getting any white is impossible. The end result of all this is that the range of color devices such as a monitor, or a printer, can display is not the same. The official name for this range is the color gamut of a device.

The picture shows examples of color gamuts. The colored horseshoe shape shows all the colors the human eye can see. The black triangle shows a typical gamut of a monitor. Colors inside the triangle can be shown on a monitor and those outside can not. The yellow shape shows the gamut of a printer. It does not reach all the way up to the top point of the monitor triangle. That means that greens you can see on the screen can't be rendered on the printer. However, the printer can render cyans that can't be made on a monitor because the yellow shape extends past the left side of the triangle. The blue line shows a scanner gamut, which can input almost every color that can be displayed on a monitor but also some that it cannot because the scanner gamut is roughly the same shape as the monitor gamut, only bigger.

It means there is no such thing as "what you see is what you get" because it is simply impossible to render every monitor color on a printer. Color Management gets around this as follows. Each color gamut is mathematically related to a common reference color space. This common reference space allows devices to talk to each other in a common color language, so any device color space can be converted to any other via the common reference space. The conversion uses information from the device profile. In Windows the reference color space goes by the name sRGB and its gamut is similar to the monitor gamut. The conversion from device to reference color space is done by squishing or deforming the device gamut (officially called gamut mapping). There are a number of ways to do this squishing and how it is done is controlled by the Rendering Intent. The effect of all this is to hide the mismatch between the colors that can be displayed on a monitor and a printer. It does not, however, result in _exactly_ the same colors being displayed. As a result, Color Management helps you get better agreement between screen and print but is not a magic bullet that "makes color always come out the same everywhere".

Home