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Colour Management

Colour Management

Have you ever wondered why YOUR graphics don’t look as vibrant as you had expected?

The human eye can discern approximately 32 million colours. A monitor has the ability to display about 16 million colours. This results in images that don’t look as vibrant as you remember when viewing them. Particularly difficult colours to reproduce are oranges. This is why those great sunset photos look different than how you remembered them on the monitor and different again when they are printed.

Why do images on the monitor look so different when they are printed?

The short answer is RGB (the way colour is created on your monitor, starting from black and adding colours) and CMYK (the way colour is created with a printer, starting with white and taking colours away) have different colour gamuts. The way colour is created with a printer results in a smaller range of colours which means those vibrant oranges that were on your monitor are muted on the printed graphics.

SSK Signs creates custom ICC profiles for each media and each printer to ensure the best possible colour reproduction.

If colour is important to you, call SSK Signs to learn more about how we manage colour.

Why do images look different on different monitors?

The manufacturing tolerances on monitors and printers will result in different colours from the same settings, unless all of the devices have been calibrated to an universal standard.

There are 3 ways to deal with these manufacturing tolerances that create sub optimal colours:

  1. Do nothing – This is the most common approach.
  2. Trial and error – This is time consuming and expensive but can produce better results than option #1.
  3. Implement a colour management system – SSK Signs adjusts each device and media to a universal LAB standard to maximize the colour gamut of the printer to produce the most vibrant and consistent images possible.

Why colour management is important for you:

  • Brand colour consistency
  • Printed images as close as possible to how they were designed
  • Graphics/images printed at different times look the same