COLOUR PRINTING (BASICS)
The printer drivers supplied with your printer provide several controls for changing the colour output. For general use the automatic settings will suffice, providing reasonable default settings that will produce good results for most documents.
Many applications have their own colour settings, and these may override the settings in the printer driver. Please refer to the documentation for your software application for details on how that particular program’s colour management functions.
FACTORS THAT AFFECT THE APPEARANCE OF PRINTS
If you wish to manually adjust the colour settings in your printer driver, please be aware that colour reproduction is a complex topic, and there are many factors to take into consideration. Some of the most important factors are listed below.
Differences between the range of colours a monitor or printer can reproduce
>Neither a printer nor a monitor is capable of reproducing the full range of colours visible to the human eye. Each device is restricted to a certain range of colours. In addition to this, a printer cannot reproduce all of the colours displayed on a monitor, and vice versa.
>Both devices use very different technologies to represent colour. A monitor uses Red, Green and Blue (RGB) phosphors (or LCDs), a printer uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) toner or ink.
>A monitor can display very vivid colours such as intense reds and blues and these cannot be easily produced on any printer using toner or ink. Similarly, there are certain colours, (some yellows for example), that can be printed, but cannot be displayed accurately on a monitor. This disparity between monitors and printers is often the main reason that printed colours do not match the colours displayed on screen.
Colour printing (Basics) > 39