Do the colors in your digital prints look wrong?

Before you blame your inkjet printer, photofinisher or assume that your monitor is not calibrated correctly, you should consider the lighting conditions where you are making those color judgments. It might just be that you're seeing things "in a different light."

The Color of Light

The fact is all light sources have their own color. Daylight, tungsten lights, fluorescence lights, all emit light at a different color temperature. (Color temperature if how light color is measured.). Since each of these light sources has a different color, the color in your prints will look different under each of there different light sources.

A simple way to illustrate the effect of how light sources affect print color is to take one of your digital prints and view it under a number of different light sources.  As you change light sources you will likely observe that some or all of the colors in your digital print appear different.

So what's happening?

When you look at a printed image, how print color appears to your eye is really a combination the viewing light color reflected off of your print colors. With some digital prints depending on the paper type and ink type, the apparent color difference can be dramatic.  This is why it is important to produce prints and view prints under known and consistent lighting conditions.

What can you do about it? 

The trick to the proper evaluation of color is consistency.  The printing industry has known this for years and has established standards for viewing conditions and many industry printers use special lighting booths for evaluation color just to make sure that their viewing conditions are consistent and accurate. 

For most of us, this is a bit impractical.  What we can do though is to make sure that our viewing conditions are consistent .  When adjusting for print color and evaluating the results, we can make sure that our viewing lights are to some kind of known standard.  Generally, daylight is accepted as the standard lighting source.  This standard is often referred to as D50 or 5000 K

How do I know I have a Daylight Viewing Lighting Source?

Your don't necessary have to buy an expensive lighting booth to do all this.  The good news is that there is a very inexpensive device for the visual control of color viewing.  Light color indicator labels are available that tell you if you are judging the color accuracy of your prints under the daylight standard lighting source or some other lighting source.

These light color indicator labels (simulated) when viewed under various light sources appear with and without strips. Under a 5,000 K standard light source the stripes do not appear. The top image shows what the strip looks like under a standard light source.

When stripes do appear when the light indicator (simulated) is being viewed under non-standard light sources, such as incandescent or being viewed under other nonstandard light sources, such cool and warm white fluorescent.

Viewing color temperature is one of two factors that affects color evaluation. The other factor is the intensity of the viewing light. Ideally, when evaluating color, your prints and your light color indicator label should be viewed under bright light.

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