Recently you see and hear the terms like "Color Matching" or
"Color Management" when you use digital cameras, scanners, PC monitors, and color
printers. Many people enjoy printing their photos on postcard at home. Sometimes they
found that your printer did not print as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
Color matching is a technology for matching colors among different devices.
Rather surprizing, but RED is not the same red between your pc monitor and printer. Remember, can you tell how "red" the apple is? how "red" the tulip before you? There are a lot of reds all over in the world.
In digital color world, there are some standard to express the colors: just like Pantone® and Munsell color chart.
You will never be free with this issue if you are with digital colors!
Then Why colors don't match among
different devices? Well, look at the images below. The left image
shows RGB red, green and blue, and the right image shows
CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
|
 
|
The left image shows "Additive Colors", which is the
way to represent colors by emitting RGB color lights. Additive colors are for TV,
PC monitor, video, scanner, camera. As adding lights produces, lightness and chrome (saturation) increases. Therefore Black is represented with no lights, the darkness.
|
The right image shows "Subtractive Colors". This is the way for printing.
A color printer print colored ink to produce multi-colors, using "only" 4 process
inks. If you need red, a printer doesn't use red ink but combine Magenta
and Yellow ink together and make red on the printed material. Contrary to addictive colors,
lightness and chrome (saturation of color) decrease as mixing inks. When you combine Cyan,
Magenta, and Yellow ink all together, you can produce black in theory. But actually
this combined color looks like dark reddish brown, that's why black (K) ink is added
to CMY ink. Then how do you think a printer produces white? It is "no ink printed". If a print
NoColor__70ium is white, then a printer can produces "white".
|
Now you see that even in RGB lights or CMYK inks, every device produces multi-colors
following its own rules of mixing color elements.
Color Matching (or Color Management) is a technology to
match colors among different color gamuts, different devices. It is a kind of
"translation". So our Printer Driver has a lookup table
to match colors, which is called Color Profile, between sRGB (Windows®
standard) and GT-541 CMYK. Generally
speaking, RGB color gamut is wider than CMYK color gamut except the 100% Cyan,
Magenta, Yellow points. You make artwork image on PC monitor, in the light world,
the wider color gamut but no brilliant fluorescent colors are in CMYK. Therefore
the algorithm to compress (or map) RGB color gamut into CMYK color gamut is
one of the most important technology. This enabes users to make artwork on
PC and print from a priter in the appropriate colors.
|
By color matching technology, color gamuts of each devices are matched by mathmatics.
There are more than 16 million colors handled in digital color world and most of
those colors are complemented values by calculation. We said that color matching
is a kind of translation among different devices. So what is the most important
is:
|
| |
 If you want to keep the original accuracy, the number of translation (color matching) is "the lesser, the better".
| |
|
As the result, the best way to get best print is to take care of color settings of each application and set color mode of artwork file as RGB, use RGB color palette to fill objects. because GT-541 is non-PostScript RGB printer.
These settings will bring color values directly to GT-541 with highest accuracy of color matching translation.
|
|
|
Simultaneously, please take care of other devices' color settings such as PC monitors, scanners and digital cameras, because those devices also require a lot of cares in color matching, too. These settings will work or kill the printer Driver color matching. If your customer want to know to get better print, show them the way to make better artwork.
|
The types of printing NoColor__70ia may change color reproduction. Our standard is Hanes® Beefy-T® because it is thick enough and its stitches is tight so that ink colors reproduce clearly. Some thinner or cotton-mix materials less color-reproductive.
|
