Why print is so different to screens

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I’m sure you may have printed your work a few times, maybe in small sizes, maybe just for a project, maybe just because you had access to a printer. You may have noticed or heard of how dull your digital images look on paper, or seen your reds turn brown, or your red tones turn orange. I’ve even seen great digital photographers print their work, and shrug off the obvious flaws or poor quality of their work in print.

There are a lot of tricks when it comes to print that don’t apply to digital displays, and a lot of tricks for digital files, you would never use in print. It’s often a lot harder to test and define, especially when it comes down to personal preference.

So I thought I’d introduce you to a few common threads that may explain why digital and print are so different, and often get so confused.

Firstly, most of your images for web are sRGB, this is a single colour space, hence the sRGB, RGB however RGB could be a series of differently defined RGB spaces, mainly based on how much room for each colour there is, i.e. Adobe RGB, NTSC, UHDTV, Display-P3, each one defined slightly differently and appearing to us in different ways. It’s often hard to tell which is which, and why one is better than the other, honestly it’s a personal preference thing, but screens that display more Adobe RGB 98%+ are usually 5x as expensive as sRGB because they’re screens that are great for checking and calibrating for print work, because they display more of a true colour range which makes it easier to check and test and get accurate prints.

Apple’s Macbook’s for example are what is called Display-P3 which sits somewhere between sRGB and Adobe RGB, they’re more accurate, and display a wider range of the RGB spectrum (99% for sRGB and usually 70-80% for Adobe). It’s also why a lot of screens seem duller, due to things like contrast ratios and actual colours displayed.

Surprisingly complex I know, but it’s important to understand because it will effect how your final images appear.

Now it’s time for the mother of frustrations, what on earth is different about print to digital, It comes down to firstly what colours are used to make up print colour space. Rather than it being three primary colours Red, Green, Blue, it’s Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, aka. CMYK.

With CMYK you get colours by subtracting each colour, the difference between Cyan and Yellow gives Green. When you look at the difference it often feels like your eyes are playing tricks on you, because with CMYK black is in the middle although it might almost look like another colour. With RGB instead you’re adding colours together to create a new colour, which your eyes very much should see instantly.

So much like much there’s sRGB in the RGB colour space which is how you’re probably looking at almost all images online right now in. With print there’s different colour spaces. The difference is, there’s a lot more of them, when I say a lot more, there’s almost an infinite amount based on what you use to print and how you choose to print, there’s one for specific print types, for different print sources, for different sorts of printers, for different brands, etc etc etc.

It’s because if you have a slightly different shade of Cyan or Magenta or Yellow, the colour mix and colour space will be different, paper stocks also impact how the colours are perceived and how bright they appear, there’s also the chemical effects of things like brighteners, much like when looking at a gloss screen things may seem brighter, you’ll find the same with a finished print.

For many printers 4 colours isn’t enough often they’ll add even more colours to the printer just to allow them to widen how much colour tone they can display. Many printers use 12 cartridges each with a different colour, and a different job to enrich and liven an image.

Basically with CMYK, it’s easier to produce richer images. Your colour can shimmer, and change before your eyes, you can see detail, and tone and depth that honestly with a screen might be quite hard to pick up on.

Just like RGB, CMYK is a colour space, however, it’s how you reach each colour that makes the difference. With RGB you get the colours by combining each primary colour to get the other colours, Red + Green = Yellow.

This also means when you are displaying these on your screen, you aren’t necessarily getting the full range of colour that you will when you finally print your images, it’s important to “proof” your images before finalising them, and use a colour checker like this one to get your images right.

It’s also why standardisation is so important for computers, and often quite hard for prints, and why colour science can sometimes feel a bit like a lost art.