By printer, I am not meaning that infernal machine that sits beside your desk and is the cash cow for HP, Canon or however, but those guys that charge you the big bucks for printing thousands of copies to those of us who need traditional marketing collateral, or want to sell books or photographs.

I spoke to one of my neighbours late last week, she and her partner where looking forward to publishing a book featuring some very fine aviation paintings.

Sadly they have just at great expense had to ditch the first print run, because the artist involved had huge problems with the colours not matching what he was expecting.

Now I have not yet fully investigated what has happened, but I am going to take an inspired guess, it’s got lost in translation somewhere in the electronic chain.

Remember back in those physics classes at school (for those of us awake), if you shine a red blue and green light on a screen when they overlap you gets near white. It’s what you are likely looking at now – your computer operates in the world of RGB. It adds them to get the spectrum of colours.

Your printer works in reverse – you start most of the time with white but need the spectrum of colours back to black – i.e the printer needs to subtract the colours back from black to give you the colour and shade you are looking for.

This means that when you normally operate software in a computer it is likely to be RGB based, but by the time it hits your printer (remember that guy who you needed to pay big bucks too) he will need to at some point convert it to a CMYK file for subsequent printing, may Adobe products for example can default to either and allow the translation to take place – but you need to check the results.

Sometimes this translation is minimal and for some non-critical work it will not throw up any issues.

PLEASE I beg you if you are doing a serious print run to discuss this mater with the parties involved, and get professional help and always insist on a proof to sign off before committing to a full print run.

Otherwise you will be visiting the recycling centre with a massive hole in your pocket.

Once you have addressed this issue, another one should be addressed by anybody who is involved in photographic reproduction and that is monitor calibration – this again is a process is designed to better match what you have on screen with what you finally end up with on the printed page. No system is perfect in this regard – however a correctly adjusted system will take you closer.

Calibration of monitors is best done with hardware solutions such as those sold by Databacolor and with solutions starting around £80 this cost is easily recovered by avoiding wasted printer runs. Lastly the printer it’s self can be calibrated and most of the high-end photographic paper vendors such as premaJet offer this.

If any of this is causing you concern, please feel free to contact me to discuss further

Roy 12th April 2010