16.1. The Challenge of WYSIWYG Printing

WYSIWYG, as you may know, is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get." For image-editing buffs, it describes that elusive goal of getting your prints to match what you see on your screen. When you think about the different ways colors are produced by monitors versus printers, the problem starts to make sense.

A monitor's surface is made from glass or some other transparent material, and, as you learned in Chapter 5, it produces colors with phosphors, LCD elements, or other light-emitting technology. In contrast, printers use a combination of opaque paper, reflected light, and CMYK ink. (Remember, that's short for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.) To add even more excitement, some printers use additional colors like light cyan, light magenta, several varieties of black, and so on. Given these two completely different approaches, it's a miracle that the images on your monitor look remotely similar to the ones you print. And because there are a bazillion different monitors and printers on the market—each using different printing technologies—you'll see a big difference in how your images look simply because of the monitor or printer you're using at that time. Heck, even changing the paper in your printer makes a big difference in how your images print.