Someone posted a question about printing digital collage sheets on one of the stampers’ groups I belong to, Midwest Stampers. Her problem was that, whenever she printed digital collage sheets, the colours weren’t true to the monitor and looked washed out. Since I make and print oodles of digital collages, collage sheets and patterned paper, I gave her a few tips on the group, but then decided to post about it here too because it appears to be a common problem.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the printed version of your collage or collage sheets will always be slightly different from what you see on the monitor. That’s because monitor and printer render colours differently—your screen uses combinations of Red, Green and Blue (RGB) while your printer uses Cian, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) inks.

However, you can manage the printing process to make sure your collage sheets (or indeed collages, background paper, or anything you are printing) looks as close as possible to what appears on screen.

So let’s look at the basics. For a good quality print, you need a decent quality printer. Not necessarily a top of the range one, but one that can handle photo quality pictures. I use Canon’s Pixma IP 4500, and it works fine for me with a couple of adjustments, whereas no amount of fiddling on my part has ever produced a decent result on my back-up printer, which is not photo quality.

Paper plays a part too. Using plain copier paper will inevitably produce plain images. However, there are plenty of really good, affordable papers out there that make for interesting prints. For collage sheets, I like to use decoupage ink jet paper. If you live in Europe, the one stocked by Crafty Computer Paper is worth a try. Otherwise, you can find it at an office supply store or, more likely, a specialist paper supplier, many of which retail online. It is not always called decoupage paper, by the way, so you may want to look for a 120gms satin-finish paper (that’s roughly 80lb text-weight if I got the conversion right).

For patterned paper prints, I prefer to use inkjet watercolour paper, which is heavier and renders colours in a soft, watercolour like finish. Again, you can find it at specialist suppliers—it will usually weighs in the region of 240gms plus (about 170lb text-weight, or 80-100lb card stock weight). But that’s purely my personal preference. You can use lighter paper (again decoupage-style paper is good for its brilliant colours) or canvas style paper for an artistic finish (Hahnemuhle makes the very best ones, in my opinion, but they are expensive).

Anyway, once you have the right printer and the right paper, the fun begins. You need to tweak your colour settings to optimise the printed result. Your first port of call to manage colours is to use your printer’s own system. This will change from printer to printer, so you should read your manual or the printer’s website for more information but I’ll use my Pixma IP 4500 as an example.

When I hit print, a contact window appears, with a drop down menu. This drop down menu has several options, including one called Quality and Media. That’s the option you want (bear in mind it may be called a bit differently on your printer). This allows you to choose the print quality you need and the type of paper that most closely resembles the one you are using—e.g. matte photo paper, glossy photo paper, plain paper etc.

The types of paper available are limited and depend on your printer—mine, for example, doesn’t offer semi-glossy—so you need to experiment to find the one that works best with the actual paper you are using. For collage sheets to be printed on decoupage-style paper, I have found that selecting the glossy photo paper option works rather well. And of course make sure you choose the highest possible quality available for your collage sheets—on the Pixma this means ticking the “Print a top quality photo” box, but other printers may simply have draft, good and best quality tickboxes.

Run a print and check it. Your printer has an automated system to correct the colours of the print version, and sometimes it works fine, but, if it doesn’t, you may want to tweak the colours manually (e.g. a bit more cian, a bit less magenta) depending on what your first print looks like. This you can do from the Colour Options element of the print contact window’s dropdown menu.

Much better than this manual tweaking, however, is using your image editing’s colour management system. I have Photoshop, which is as powerful as it gets when it comes to colour management. Unfortunately, this is also where things get slightly techie, but if you have the patience to follow me through this, the results are worth it.

First of all, you will need to ensure your computer monitor is calibrated. This will allow for the closest match between what you see on screen and what you get through the printer. Professional users will follow the process explained in detail on Wikihow but, as a serious yet lazy amateur, I just let Apple’s own Display Calibrator Assistant software do all the work. There are other softwares that do it for PCs (e.g. Adobe Gamma) and even some professional ones, such as ColorVision, but they are frankly a bit over the top for the odd digital collage sheet printing!

Once your monitor is calibrated, you will need the so-called ICC profiles for your printer. Don’t worry about the arcane name—these profiles simply detail the combinations of print, paper and ink you can use. So for example, the ICC for my Pixma IP4500 for matte photo paper with good printing quality is Canon IP 4500 series (that’s the printer series) MP (that’s matter paper) 2 (that’s the printing quality, where 1 is best).

The ICC profiles for your printers should already be installed on your computer—this should have happened when you installed your printer, at least on a MAC—but if they are not, you can download them for free from your printer manufacturer’s website. In any case, you will have to go to your manufacturer’s site to make sense of the profiles’ meanings, and familiarise yourself with the acronyms they use, such as MP (matte paper) or GP (glossy paper).

Once you have done these two things, you are ready to play. Photoshop has a soft proofing function which allows you to proof your print on screen to see how the colours will turn out. It’s a brilliant, brilliant tool, which will make all the difference to your printing and I really recommned using it.

OK, so open your digital collage sheet and go to View→ Proof Set-up→ Custom. A contact window will come up. On the Profile drop down menu, choose the ICC profile that is closest to the medium you are using. For example, if I am printing on a glossy paper, I’ll choose Canon IP4500 series GP2, which is the best quality option available on my printer.

Now move down to the next drop down menu. This will allow you to choose the Intent—that’s the way the colours are rendered. There are four options: Perceptual, Saturation, Relative Colorimetric and Absolute Colorimetric. In my experience, Relative Colorimentric works best but it’s worth experimenting to find out what works for you.

Assuming you are printing on white paper, you will also want to tick the Simulate Paper White box. If the Preview box is ticked, you should now be able to see a close proof of what your print out will be like. If you are happy with it, you can now proceed to printing.

Go to File→ Print with Preview and choose Colour Management from the dropdown box situated just under your image’s preview (the default is Output). Once you have selected Colour Management, you will need to scroll down to where it says Print Space, and select the Profile and Intent that best worked in your proof (e.g. Canon iP4500 series GL2 and Relative Colorimetric). Make sure the Black Point Compensation box is ticked, then hit Print.

But wait, you need to do one last thing. Now that you have instructed Photoshop to manage the colours when printing, you don’t want your printer to do the job too, otherwise your print will not look anything like your proof. So in the Print contact window, choose Colour Options and, in the Colour Correction drop down, choose the None option (this may be called slightly differently on your printer, e.g. No Colour Management, but you get the gist).

Now Photoshop is in charge, and you should have a lovely print.

This is the digital version


And this is the Photoshop soft proof
The print version was very similar to the soft proof