Why Do Color Differences Occur When Printing From Your PC?

If you've ever messed around with the color settings of your images, you've probably come across these three terms: Hue, Saturation, and Brightness.

Blue, green, and violet are all examples of hues. They are hues. 'Hue' is defined as "the characteristics of colors that allow them to be classified as red, yellow, green, blue, or an intermediate between any adjacent pair of these colors."

The saturation of a color refers to how vivid it is. The more gray there is in relation to the amount of color, the less vivid it will be.

Brightness: This term refers to the color's relative darkness or lightness.

A. Munsell, an American artist, published a color measurement system in 1905, naming the three parameters Hue, Value, and Chroma (Hue, Saturation and Brightness as above). This three-dimensional relationship led to color identification in this format, such as 7.5YR 7/12. A yellow-red hue with a value of 7 and a chroma of 12 is present here. The book is 40 pages long and covers every color in the Munsell system.

Color output from monitors and printers

Printer

Printer colors are created by inkjet cartridges that emit minute patterns of ink dots on paper. All of the colors you see are made up of only four colors: cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K).

Aside from that, a mixture of cyan, magenta, and yellow should produce black, but only a trace of black is required.

Monitor

A phosphor is a substance that, when exposed to radiation, emits light. Color phosphors in your monitor are illuminated by electrons, resulting in images. Each pixel on the screen contains three colored phosphors: red (R), green (G), and blue (B) (B).

Color differences between monitors and printers

As you are aware, the printed output rarely matches exactly what you see on your monitor 100 percent of the time. This is due to the fact that the way color is produced differs and the range of colors produced differs between the monitor and printer, as described above.

There are ways to get a more accurate match. To help match the two, you can experiment with printer driver settings or use image editing/color management software.

The Printing Method

Because most inkjet printers cannot produce variations of the three primary colors, they use a technique known as 'halftoning' to represent the thousands of colors required. 'Dithering' and 'Error Diffusion' are the two methods used for this.

Dithering is the process of aligning different colored ink dots to create the appearance of neutral colors...suitable for large areas of color, such as graphs and bar charts. There are frequently additional settings such as 'Coarse Dithering'...for images with little detail and shading, and 'Fine Dithering'...for images with a lot of detail.

Inkjet cartridge dots are merged with surrounding color dots in 'error diffusion' to produce natural colors with the possibility of subtle color gradation. Perfect for detailed images or photos.

If you're only going to print text, choose 'No Halftoning.'

When scanning, keep in mind that getting a good match will be more difficult because the scanner will create the image in CMYK data format, then RGB on the monitor, and then back to CMYK data format via the printer.