File Monitor/Printer Curves

The purpose of Monitor/Printer Curves is to provide better matching between monitor and printer than is normally possible using standard color management. A common issue with color management is that it assumes prints will be viewed under optimal lighting conditions, which include a rather high level of illumination with a viewing light of known spectral qualities. Unfortunately, real world viewing conditions often fall well short of this ideal situation. A print viewed in low or moderate light may look very different in bright light. There is a significant loss of shadow detail and a general sense that the prints are "too dark" when compared with the way they look on the monitor. In addition, the color temperature of the viewing light may also make the print look too yellow or too blue or take on some other color cast.

To deal with these issues, Picture Window lets you create one or more sets of monitor curves which are simply red, green and blue lookup tables applied to all images when they are displayed. A corresponding set of printer curves are also generated and can be applied to images you print. If, for example, you need to darken images on the monitor to make them look the same as prints, the monitor curve will darken the images and the companion printer curve will lighten the images before printing to compensate. Similarly, color casts removed by the printer curves to match prints will be changed to a complementary color cast before printing to restore neutrality. For an in-depth discussion of how this works, see Color Management manual.

Grid

This setting lets you choose how many points the curve will have. The more points, the more control you have over the shape of the curve but the trickier it is to adjust.

Load... and Save As...

These buttons let you save the current curve as both a monitor and a printer curve or reload monitor curves from a saved file. Saved printer curves are displayed in the Print dialog and can be used to adjust the image so the printed version matches the displayed version more closely.

Reset

The Reset button resets the current printer curves to a 4x4 grid and curves that have no effect on the display.

Creating and Using Printer Curves

Before creating printer curves, first print the file Gray Wedge 15.tif we supply with Picture Window. It is installed in the the Sample Images sub-folder of your default settings folder (normally My Documents\Picture Window Pro).

Next, select Monitor/Printer Curves... from the File menu. Adjust the brightness curve first by dragging the middle control points to get a good tonal match between the gray wedge image as displayed on your monitor and the print of the same image viewed under the same lighting you expect it to be view under, especially as regards to the ability to distinguish adjacent dark and light patches. If you find you need more curve points, select a finer grid using the grid control in the upper left corner of the dialog box. Once you have a good tonal match, click on any of the white squares below the curve to select color casts for the corresponding parts of the tonal range. This splits the curve into three curves - one for each RGB channel. Finally, click Save As... to save your monitor and printer curves for future use as you may need different curves for different viewing conditions.

To print images to be viewed under the conditions associated with the current printer curves, select Printer Curve at the bottom of the Print dialog box. This will adjust the image before printing it so that the final result will match your monitor -- you should see the preview image get lighter as soon as you select the printer curve. If you have more than one set of printer curves, make sure the correct one is loaded into the Printer Curves dialog box before printing. To print normally, set Printer Curve to None.

  Monitor Curves Main Tool Bar Button

This button on the main tool bar that toggles the effect of monitor curves on and off. Be careful not to leave Monitor Curves turned on if they are not needed as they distort the display and can cause you edit your images to compensate, throwing them off for normal viewing. When the Monitor/Printer Curves dialog box starts up, it turns on monitor curves so you can see their effects on other windows. When you close the dialog box, monitor curves are turned off. You can turn them on again at any time with the monitor curves tool bar button.

Close

When you are done with the Monitor/Printer Curves, just click the X icon in the upper right corner of the dialog box to close it. If you have any unsaved changes, it will ask if you want to save them, turn off Monitor Curves, and then exit.