Nikon software

George Cairns shows you how to produce prints with accurate colours

Get better-quality prints, with more accurate and satisfying colours, straight from Nikon Capture NX-D

After using Capture NX-D’s tools to boost saturation and correct colour balance, you may want to share your edited

images as prints. However, this can frequently lead to disappointing results, as while on your computer screen you may see vibrant colours that appear to be accurate, you may end up with prints in which the colours have shifted or look drab.

This discrepancy between screen and print colour is caused by a variety of factors. Your computer’s screen produces millions of colours by mixing reds, greens and blues (RGB) together, while most desktop printers combine cyan, magenta, yellow and black (also known as ‘key’, hence CMYK) to create a much narrower range of shades. Your computer screen is also illuminated, which creates more vibrant-looking colour; a paper print can often look rather flat in comparison.

Colour control

Programs such as Photoshop and Lightroom include a range of tools designed to help you produce accurate colours that will look good when printed – Photoshop will warn you about ‘out of gamut’ colours (see left), while Lightroom enables you to preview a soft proof of your photo before you print it. Capture NX-D lacks these useful print-related tools, but there are still things that you can do to get better results when printing from Capture NX-D.

By default your Nikon will capture colours using a colour space that’s biased towards displaying images on screens – this makes sense, as you’ll view your shots on your camera’s LCD and then on your computer. However, with a little digging around in Capture NX-D’s Preferences you can change the default colour space to a more print-compatible one. By processing your photos using this colour space you’re less likely to produce unprintable colours, as we’ll show you in our walkthrough.