#WHICH PRINTER BEST MATCH FOR MAC MAC OS X#
#WHICH PRINTER BEST MATCH FOR MAC DOWNLOAD#

In the resulting dialog box, click Color Management on the left and from the Color Handling pop-up menu, choose “Photoshop Elements Manages Colors”. In Photoshop Elements, choose File -> Print and then click the More Options button at the bottom of the dialog box. The trick is to turn on ColorSync, as shown here.

#WHICH PRINTER BEST MATCH FOR MAC MAC OS X#

You can access printer profiles within any program that uses a standard Mac OS X print dialog box including iPhoto, GraphicConverter, and others. When you do, a Profile pop-up menu appears underneath. For example, to use a printer profile with iPhoto, choose the photo you want to print and then in the final print dialog box-the standard Mac OS X print dialog box, not iPhoto’s print settings dialog box-choose Color Matching from the pop-up menu in the middle and turn on ColorSync. You also need to instruct the program you’re using to manage the color itself, instead of letting the printer do it. Once you’ve installed a profile, you can access it within your Mac’s Print dialog box (though you may need to restart the program to get the new profile to show up). Here you can see the paper-specific profiles available for Epson’s Stylus Photo R3000.

The more closely a profile matches your printing conditions, the more accurate and useful it is. For example, Epson makes profiles to match almost every kind of paper it sells. You can also search for paper-specific profiles, commonly referred to as paper or output profiles. The profiles you get from big companies, such as Epson, come with an installer, too. You can also do a Google search including your printer make and model, such as “Epson R3000 profiles”.

#WHICH PRINTER BEST MATCH FOR MAC DOWNLOAD#

Most of the time, you can download profiles right from the printer or paper manufacturer’s Website, although you might have to hunt for them. Your printer’s color gamut depends on the specific combination of printing technologies you’re using, including the following: While the color ranges of monitors and printers usually overlap, they’re rarely identical.

How do those two color modes differ? By the range of colors they can reproduce, called a color gamut.įor example, an RGB monitor can reproduce one range of colors and a CMYK printer can reproduce another (and no printer on the planet can produce a color range as wide as your eyes can see). In most cases, your painting or image starts life in RGB color mode (short for red, green, and blue) and eventually ends up being converted to some version of CMYK when it’s printed (by the printer itself or manually by you in a program like GraphicConverter, Photoshop Elements, or Photoshop). This article describes how you can make that happen in programs such as iPhoto, GraphicConverter, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop CS5. Once you get that information, you can communicate it to the program you’re printing with. Therefore, the only way to achieve consistent printing results is to know which printer your art is headed for, which color mode that printer wants your art to be in, what range of colors that printer can reproduce on paper, and which paper you’re using.

Even changing the paper in your printer makes a big difference in how designs, artwork, or photos will print. And because there are a slew of monitors and printers on the market-each using different printing technologies-your art will look different simply because of the monitor or printer you’re using at that moment. Given these two completely different approaches for creating color, it’s a miracle that any images on your monitor look like the ones you print. Newer printers designed for fine art prints can also use additional colors like light cyan, light magenta, several varieties of black, and so on. Printers, on the other hand, use a combination of opaque paper, reflected light, and CMYK ink (short for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). Once you understand that, the whole “color-matching” problem starts to make a lot more sense.Ī monitor’s surface is made from glass (or other transparent material) and, depending on the type, produces colors with phosphors, LCD elements, or other light-emitting technology. The first step, however, is to understand the different ways in which color is produced by monitors and printers. This article explains how you can use printer- and paper-specific instructions-called profiles-to achieve more accurate results.

Getting your prints to match what you see on your monitor is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when dealing with digital art or photography.

Which printer best match for mac