Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm working with colour images that I have changed to black and white, and have altered the contrast of by playing with the different colour channels. My aim is to achieve the same tonal difference and brightness etc. that I am seeing on the screen when I print the images.
Which aspects of the image tend to be affected when printing? (I will be printing in full CMYK colour). I assume the brightness is one of them as my images always come out considerably darker than they appear on screen.
If you need to manually and visually calibrate your transfer curve you can use a trick gamma calibration trick.
For visual calibration: Print several different tones next to a 50% line pattern then view the patterns at distance and choose the one that best visually matches your swatch. You can repeat this for 25% and 75% then you can make a curve transfer that coverts your visual values to these values.
Image 1: a acreen optimized version with 2 swatches next to each other, preferably you'd print several of these with swatches next to each other.
This is a bit technical so to get a near perfect 50% line pattern you will need to use a vector drawing software. Or better yet craft you printer code manually. By doing it manually you wont get aliasing.
You can also use a magnifying glass and calculate the coverage of each printed swatch and calculate the tone by hand but this is a bit of work.
