Printer profiles

Mike Harris explains how you can use ICC profiles to fix the disparity between your monitor and printer

Print proper pictures with ICC profiles

If you print photographs, but hardly consider yourself a seasoned whiz, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered problems when trying to match what comes out of your printer with what’s on your monitor.

The fact is that printers – even great ones – often don’t produce consistent colours, which can be a problem if you’re looking to produce high-quality prints; the camera, lighting, exposure and editing all contribute to its aesthetic, and when a single stop here, or a tweak to the saturation there, can make all the difference, accurate prints are crucial.

The solution is colour management. By installing ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles you can make your printer adhere to industry standards and while this might sound complicated, profiles are easy to obtain, cost-effective and simple to use. In fact, many paper manufacturers have ready-todownload profiles that you can obtain from their website. But if you want to go the whole hog and download the most accurate profiles available, some paper manufacturers will build custom profiles for your specific printer, ink and paper combinations.

Fotospeed offers this service for free, with their own-brand papers. You just need to print a test sheet, pop it in the post and await your bespoke profile.

So, rather than waste time, ink and paper roughly replicating your vision via trial and error, let’s lift the lid on ICC profiles.

What’s an ICC profile?

ICC profiles adjust the way an output device replicates colour. But you must also ensure your monitor has been recently calibrated with a device like Datacolor’s Spyderx calibrators. Otherwise your printer and monitor won’t match up properly.

Download a test chart

Fotospeed allows you to download a custom profiling pack from www.bit.ly/2kac5fg. This includes your test chart, which will be scanned by a spectrophotometer to create your profile. Ensure you print it as is; any tampering (even resizing) can ruin its accuracy.

Profile per paper

The idea of a custom profile is that it is generated for your specific printer, ink and paper combo. If any of those variables change, you’ll need to create another test chart. For most people, the variable that will change is the paper. So, if you intend to use three types of paper regularly, print a test chart on each and send them off all at once.

Generic vs custom

Generic and custom ICC profiles exist. The former will match your model of printer, ink and paper, and can be downloaded and used immediately. The latter requires you to print and send off a test chart. This takes time, but the profile is tailored to your unique print setup.

Print the chart

The most accurate way to print the chart is with Adobe Color Printer Utility (www.adobe.ly/3djmxwy). It allows you to turn off your driver’s colour management setting to produce an accurate chart. PC users have to tell the software to do this; it’s turned off on Macs.

Using ICC profiles

Fotospeed sends custom profiles via email with instructions. If using Adobe Lightroom, you can select your profile in the Print Module, via the Color Management tab. In Photoshop, select File>print, set Color Handling to Photoshop Manages Colors and click your chosen profile from the Printer Profile dropdown menu.