ICBMs?
Thank you for an interesting magazine, which i have read for several years. I would like to see a future project/article on how to adjust colours on a printer in Linux. I have a HP laser printer and run Ubuntu on my PC. The colours on my monitor are good, but when I print a picture the colours becomes very dark.
I understand there are ICM profiles, but I have not found one for my printer. Can I create one myself without investing a lot of money in equipment or software? MatsWerf,viaemail Neil says Thanks for your kind words, they always make us blush. As for your problem and suggestion, that’s a really good idea. Both sides of colour calibration (printers and monitors) are either often overlooked or ignored, but on Linux the deviceagnostic system is the International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles; the Windows system uses ICM profiles, but they’re based on similar systems.
So the problem is that displays use a mixture of Red, Green and Blue to generate colour, which is one specific colour space with its own gamut. While printers uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (or a variation based on those base colours) to create their colours and again this has its own colour space (a subset of every possible colour), which is different to that your monitor uses.
In a perfect world your graphic driver contains the ICC for your monitor and the printer driver has the ICC for your printer. One colour space is converted to the other et voila, print outs look like they do on your screen, unless you’ve not calibrated your monitor in which case this is all a waste of time! So in a too long, didn’t read fashion: great idea for a feature!