As we mentioned in the summary, we have a fully colour managed environment
in our studio. The key components of this are our monitors and printers.
Monitors
You may have noticed that when you look at a picture on your home computer, then
look at it on another monitor such as your work computer, it looks a little different.
This is due to the lack of, or different calibration, between the monitors.
You will notice that by simply adjusting the brightness and/or contrast, you can
impact the colours that you see on your monitor. Other factors that can affect
the colour are your video driver, operating system and any software that you may
be using.
So, with all of this said, chances are what we see on our screen will not be exactly
the same as what you see on yours, but the important thing is, that what we see
on ours, is what we will print.
To ensure this, we have used a spectrophotometer to calibrate our monitors. In
basic terms, this means that the colours that we see on our screen are accurate
in terms of black point, white point and colour balance.
How well is your monitor calibrated?
On the scale below you should be able to see 16 separate patches starting from bright
white and ending in deep black.
To perform basic calibration you will be able to
adjust your brightness and contrast settings until these patches become clear, however
for accurate results, using software such as Adobe Gamma or spectrophotometers are
recommended.
Printers
Various types of media have different properties, and will portray colours differently.
To gain colour consistency across all media types, it is important to profile each
media type individually.
We have also used our spectrophotometer on our printers and media to
ensure that the same level of colour accuracy as the monitor is obtained.
A quick summary of how this works is that a chart of colours, similar to what you
see below is printed. The spectrophotometer then reads each individual colour patch
and compares it to the ICC (International Colour Consortiam) standard colour for
that patch. Any differences are recorded and these are used to adjust the colour
output of the printer to get the right colour.
Summary
It is quite often assumed that printing onto canvas will 'dullify' your photographs, but
we have proved that with Canvart, this is not the case! The vibrancy and accuracy
of the colours in our prints continue to impress the most fastidious of people!!
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