By now youve figured out the whole purpose of a profile. Theres no difference with the printer. The challenge with printers is relatively similar to monitors. You need to use profiles. The problem is theres just so many more printer profiles. Youll find a separate printer profile is required for each and every different type of paper and printer combination you use. Obviously, there are a zillion types of papers out there so its not a far leap to realize there are lots of printer profiles out there.

Like profiles for your monitor, printer profiles do the necessary conversion from the truth to the paper. If youre using an inkjet printer, youll find its gamut is considerably less than your monitor causing complications dealing with the conversion process. What this means is colors displayed on your monitor may be lost during conversion causing unintended consequences to your final print. Dealing with this in the old days meant making lots of hard proofs with slight tweaks of color and contrast. Obviously this approach was expensive and time consuming. Fortunately, theres technology to the rescue. The most powerful image-editing programs can soft proof your images on screen. This means you can simulate print results on screen allowing you to make appropriate color and contrast corrections without having to go through a costly, time-consuming hard copy.

Youre wondering, Why do I have to soft proof? I thought monitor profiles let me see the truth and that was all I needed. Yes and no. A calibrated monitor with the correct profile only let you see the image correctly as referenced to the Color Space you chose. Monitor profiles allow you to change the image with confidence. But, the monitor profile doesnt account for the nuances of converting the image file to a print. While you may be seeing the truth on you monitor, the truth isnt being displayed by your print. The "truth" is not your print. Thats where soft proofing and printer profiles come in. The printer profile takes into account the uniqueness of your print conditions like paper type, ink use, and the printer allowing your digital system to reliably convert colors from the "truth" to the printer.

Where does one get a printer profile? Essentially, there are two sources. The first are profiles supplied by the manufacture. The other is custom made profiles. Lets look at the differences. Most printers come supplied with a series of profiles developed by the manufacture for various types of papers. This sounds great on initial inspection. Theyre widely available, and reliable. The problem is most printers arent built with tight enough tolerances that eliminate the differences between one printer and the next. Like monitors, even though two printers may be the same model, the individual characteristics between the printers may be two great for manufacture supplied profiles to work properly. There are some printers that reputedly are built to high enough standards to allow generic profiles to function correctly. Usually theyre the high-end professional printers like the wide-format Epson 9600/7600 series. Otherwise, the best printer profiles are of the custom variety made specifically for your printer and paper combination.

Printer profiles are very specific animals. They take into account the many, many nuances of the printing process. A printer profile is best for only one set of conditions such as a specific rendering intent--remember rendering intent when talking about converting Color Space before?--media type, print density, and so on. If you change any of these, to ensure the integrity of your print workflow, you should use a custom profile specific to the new conditions. Changing the print density from 1440 dpi to 2880 dpi requires a new profile. Substitute a watercolor paper over a gloss type will require you to develop a new profile.

Custom profiles can be made several ways and theyre all relatively expensive compared to the free profiles from your manufacture. As a result, using custom profiles tends to force folks to limit the types of paper they use.

How do we use these profiles? First, lets take advantage of our soft proofing technology. In Photoshop, select the correct profile through the view menu. Chose a rendering intent. You'll find each one changes your image oh so slightly. Use the recommendations I gave earlier as initial points of reference to choose a rendering intent. Pick the one you think looks best. Once that's done, dont forget to simulate paper conditions. The first thing youll notice is your image is now duller and less vibrant. Thats testimonial to the reduced gamut of inkjet printers over a monitor. Next, make color and contrast adjustments specific to the printer profile. I do this by using curve and saturation layers that are only applicable to the print Im trying to make. The use of layers is an entirely separate discussion. Suffice to say, I make a separate layer group with saturation and curve layer specific to the paper combo I'm planing to use. After making the print look as great as I can through soft proofing, I save everything and move onto the next step.

Next, select the profile youre using and its corresponding rendering intent in your image editor's print dialog box. These should match your soft proof settings. After hitting print, you'll see your printer's dialog box. Now select the correct color conditions including print density and media type. Turn off your printers color management. Why do that? What were doing here is letting your image editor do all you color management instead of your printer's software. If you left the printers color management system active, your image would be color managed twice obviously causing unpredictable results. After all that, youre good to go. Wow!

After Printing

There are a couple more things to do to ensure you prints come out correctly. While all this stuff is highly complicated, its not 100% fool proof. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. You now have to assess your final print under the planned viewing conditions against whats displayed on your monitor. I do this by darkening my workroom and only using the same type of light source as your planned final viewing condition to illuminate the print. I directly compare this with the image on my monitor. Hopefully, they are very similar and need little if any adjustments. Thats it.

Conclusion

Overall, we plowed through ton of stuff in this article. From learning what a Color Space is and its role in you workflow to the particulars of creating a predictable print, weve covered a lot of territory. Once you get these concepts down, youll begin to realize the weaknesses of a color managed workflow. There are many opportunities along the way from image capture to print that can cause unpredictable results. Now that you know the basics, you can confidently make changes to your images and see the results materialize in your prints.