Colour Printing > 58
C
OLOUR
P
RINTING
The printer drivers supplied with your printer provide several
controls for changing the colour output. For general use the
automatic settings will suffice, providing reasonable default
settings that will produce good results for most documents.
Many applications have their own colour settings, and these may
override the settings in the printer driver. Please refer to the
documentation for your software application for details on how
that particular program’s colour management functions.
F
ACTORS
THAT
AFFECT
THE
APPEARANCE
OF
PRINTS
If you wish to manually adjust the colour settings in your printer
driver, please be aware that colour reproduction is a complex
topic, and there are many factors to take into consideration.
Some of the most important factors are listed below.
Differences between the range of colours
a monitor or printer can reproduce
> Neither a printer nor a monitor is capable of reproducing
the full range of colours visible to the human eye. Each
device is restricted to a certain range of colours. In
addition to this, a printer cannot reproduce all of the
colours displayed on a monitor, and vice versa.
> Both devices use very different technologies to represent
colour. A monitor uses Red, Green and Blue (RGB)
phosphors (or LCDs), a printer uses Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black (CMYK) toner or ink.
> A monitor can display very vivid colours such as intense
reds and blues and these cannot be easily produced on
any printer using toner or ink. Similarly, there are certain
colours, (some yellows for example), that can be printed,
but cannot be displayed accurately on a monitor. This
disparity between monitors and printers is often the main
reason that printed colours do not match the colours
displayed on screen.
