TECHNICAL HELP & SUPPORT
Spectrum have created a comprehensive help and support section to guide you through some of our services.Colour Management
For accurate and consistent results customers who make changes to their digital image files on their home computers need to ensure they are working using the current internationally accepted standards.Customers may may wish to read the following independent articles about colour management:
Why are my prints too dark?
Why don't my prints match my screen?
Monitors
The most important thing for accuracy is to make sure that you buy the best monitor you can afford with a suitable hood and calibrate it on a weekly basis using a hardware calibration device or colorimeter. These devices measure the response of your monitor to a standard set of coloured patches and can ensure that your monitor is representing colours as correctly as possible. When setting up the colour measurement software we recommend starting aim values of 6500k white point 100cd luminance and 2.2 or L* gamma (which ever your profiling software supports) we have found with experience and inline with current UGRA research that a white point of around 5800k is a closer match to a D50 illuminated image . Please refer to your user manual for instruction on where to input these variables. These can be slightly adjusted later to give a better match based on your viewing conditions. Manual adjustment using adobe gamma is not an option for colour accurate workAmbient Lighting and Print Viewing Conditions
Ambient room lighting needs to be constant both in colour temperature and brightness. Natural daylight from either north or south facing sources will change colour and brightness throughout the course of the day, also the colour of your walls and flooring will affect the overall colour and will not make for ideal viewing conditions.To be able to make a more accurate comparison between the printed and on screen images we recommend viewing them under full Spectrum D50 balanced fluorescent tubes.
Testing the Balance of Your Monitor and Viewing Conditions
To test the accuracy of your monitor, and that it matches your viewing condition, it is helpful to compare two test images; one printed and one onscreen. For this purpose we recommend the Colour management Check-up kit produced by Kodak. This pack includes a swatch that verifies that it is being viewed in the correct light. Remember florescent tubes and incandescent lamps can cause colour shifts, and prints are therefore balanced for daylight illumination.Watch our colour basics video tutorial »
Softproofing and Colour Gamut
Soft proofing is a technique where photoshop uses the output device's icc profile to mimic on screen so that you can more accurately predict what the finished print should look like.The gamut of an image is the measure of its tonal and colour range. All images have a gamut and all imaging devices can be determined in terms of their tonal and colour capability. It is a fact that limitations in the technology of image reproduction mean that on-screen colours cannot always be printed, even on the best digital printer. The principle of colour management is to anticipate and allow for changes that may occur to the image gamut during printing.
To enable you to predetermine how an on-screen image will look when printed on a particular media it is useful to make use of Photoshops soft-proof vie Please see below for an example of our colour set up control panel.
ICC SoftProof Profiles
Using Spectrum ICC Soft Proofing Profiles you can see a representation on your monitor of how the image will look when printed on to different media.Download softproof profiles »
Photoshop Set-up
We work in Adobe RGB (1998) Workspace for all Digital C-Types and Giclée prints and advise clients to use “Europe Prepress defaults” as their Photoshop Colour Settings option as they usefully activate Photoshop safety features so that images are not affected by mis-conversions or the removal of ICC profiles.Photoshop & file information video tutorial »
