Making prints match. (MacUser Associate Technical Art Director Peter Alan Gould gives advice on getting monitor and printer color proofs to match) (Special Color Publishing Supplement) (Brief Article)

Accurate color matching has been one hurdle facing publishers who want to use desktop printers and monitors prepress proofing devices. The idiom of RGB phosphors dos not translate easily to the language of CMYK inks. But progress has been made. It is possible to get reasonably consistent color from your desktop system. All it takes is the right software and hardware, a good eye for color, and a little patience.

We asked Peter Alan Gould, MacUser's associate technical art director, to explain how h calibrates his system to achieve color fidelity among on-screen images, dye-sublimation prints, and final four-color pages from the offset printing press. Follow these simple steps to get better color matching among your monitor's display, desktop printer, and final printed page. Here's proof that in-house proofing can work.

1. Take an image you've previously had printed on an offset press. Open the electronic file of the image in Adobe Photoshop. It should be representative of something you typhically sent to your printer, including colors you frequently use.

2. Using a calibration device such as those sold by Radius and SuperMac Technology, calibrate your monitor. If you don't have a hardware calibrator, use Knoll Software's Gamma control panel, which ships with Photoshop, to adjust the monitor's response curve. Try to match a white area in the image to the color of the paper on which it will be printed.

3. In Photoshop, set preference for Monitor Setup, Printing Inks Setup, and Separation Setup. Set the values for monitor preference to match those of the calibration device -- for our SuperMac PressView, we set Gamma at 2.00, White Point at 5000[degrees]K. The ink and the separation preferences should match those dictated by your press operator.