Alpha Photography Blog

Once you’re happy with your photo, you might like to print it on your home printer. Although your monitor has been calibrated, it doesn’t mean your printer will produce the colours you’re seeing on your screen.

Quite often, there is a very dramatic difference between what you’re seeing, and how your printer interprets those colours.

This is simple, but a little time consuming to fix.

To make sure the colours come out correctly from your printer, you’ll need to produce a series of ‘test strips’, which will be a cross-section of a test image, all printed on a standard sized sheet of photo paper (e.g. A4), with various colour-balanced selections chosen in your printer’s Custom settings.

Once you’ve found the correct colour-balanced settings, you can then begin printing your photos, en masse.

There are quite a few steps, but like anything, once you get the hang of it…:

• Open Photoshop;
• Open your test image (mentioned in the “Calibrating your Monitor post”);
• Create a blank page (standard size, e.g. A4);
• Using the Rectanglular Marquee Tool (top left on the Tools toolbar), take an inch thick cross-section of your test image;
• Click on the Move tool (top right on Tools);

• Click on the cross section you’ve selected and drag it over to the blank page;
• Position this towards the top of the blank page;
• Go to File - Print with Preview - Print;
• Take a new sheet of standard-sized photo paper to print on;
• Press Print;
• Check the colours to see if there are any casts, i.e. red, blue, green, yellow etc.;

Where the image looks good, then there’s no more to do except go and print your photos. But, if there are some colour problems, continue with the below:

• Click on the Move Tool;
• Move the cross section down the A4 page, so when you print again on the same sheet of photo paper, it won’t overlap what you just printed;
• Go to Print with Preview;
• Make sure the cross section is where you want to it be printed on the page (if not, move it);
• Click Print;
• Select Properties from the print window that appears;
• Under Colour/Intensity, check “Manual”, then click “Set”;

• Assume, in this case, that there is a red colour cast. You then want to add more of the opposite colour, which is Cyan, so slide the Cyan dial closer towards High - depending on how much of a colour cast there is, as to how much you will initially need to increase by;
• Make a note of the change you made;
• Click OK;
• Click OK, again; and
• And finally, OK again, to print.

This part becomes a little bit of trial and error, as you will need to repeat the above steps to remove the particular colour cast, printing between each change, until the colours are just the way you want them.

For reference, the colour wheel goes:

• Red is at one end of the scale, and Cyan is its opposite;
• Green is at one end of the scale, and Magenta is its opposite; and
• Blue is at one end of the scale, and Yellow is its opposite.

So, if you want to lessen a blue colour cast, add more yellow. The photography colour wheel is a whole other topic of its own, so this is a very simplistic explanation.

Do you still want to print your own photos at home? Or, is the local lab looking pretty attractive right about now?

Printing at home has its advantages - immediacy being the most obvious. Also, you get to control the outcome, which depending on what you want to achieve can be important.

It’s not an exact science, and is pretty subjective, so have a play and enjoy the results!

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