[Mageia-discuss] HP Printer

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2012-06-21 at 15:23 -0400, Gary Montalbine wrote:

> I consider good color to be a close copy of what I have on my monitor.

For this to work you generally need a colour-calibrated monitor.

You can buy an "open source" calibrator called the colourhug (or might
be colorhug) to do this.

If you are scanning things to get your image then you need to calibrate
your scanner, using a "colour target" or photo card. ArgyleCMS (open
source) can help you with this, but calibrate your monitor first.

Then, you need to calibrate your printer, with the inks and paper you
plan to use. One way to do this is to print the scan of the photo card,
once you have calibrated your scanner. Then scan the printout and use
argyleCMS to generate a profile.

Also, note that each device - scanner, camera, monitor, printer - has a
range of colours it can print, called its "gamut", and the ranges are
not the same.

Some open source software, such as darktable and possible gimp with the
separate+ plugin, may be able to point out which colours are out of
gamut for the target device, I'm not sure.

xsane has colour management support once you have a colour profile.

You can actually get a long way more cheaply and simply by looking
for .icc or .icm files (the colour profiles describing a device) for
your printer and monitor, but since there's huge variation both with age
of device and between devices, it's not really a good idea.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml