But Does It Work?

Simple question, complex answer. If you’re going to be working with color, your best investment will be a set of Pantone and TruMatch color swatch books. No matter how evolved color calibration has become, we reserve 100 percent trust only for the swatch books.

Although we were very careful in preparing the device profiles for the printer and monitor and spent hours experimenting, the results were far from completely accurate. It is only with experience that graphics professionals can judge what they see on screen vs. final output, and even then, they all still refer to their swatch books when possible.

After considerable testing and calibration, screen output with the calibrated monitor profile matched our Epson Stylus Color printer’s corrected output surprisingly well—a definite aid in predicting how selected colors will print. Blues were actually blue and purples were actually purple. Vivid reds, on the other hand, suffered in the translation. The screen-corrected reds looked duller than the printed ones; an uncorrected screen rendered truer reds. On balance, though, the monitor/printer correlation was acceptable...almost good.

Unfortunately, monitor/desktop printer correlation is not the litmus test for color management systems. It may suffice if you’re only going to print color on desktop printers, but the true test for commercial printing is how well the monitor and the desktop proof conform to the end product. The results of our color management experiments weren’t bad, but we’ll hang on to our swatch books, anyway, thank you very much.

A well-calibrated color profile can help improve the design process by making on-screen colors look more like the colors that you have already chosen for a project. But note the careful choice of words here: colors that you have already chosen. We don’t want to give you the impression that using Corel’s color management, however improved it is over past incarnations, makes it safe to pick colors based on how they look on screen. That would be a serious, potentially expensive, and embarrassing mistake.

The only reliable way to choose colors for a print job is to pick from printed samples. Base your choices on jobs that you have already done, or use a swatch book, such as the Pantone Color Formula Guide for spot colors, or the TruMatch Colorfinder for process colors. Once you have chosen the colors and assigned them to parts of your drawing, then you can turn on Corel’s color-correction feature and hope that the colors’ on-screen appearances will be more accurate. But if they are not—if your screen looks radically different from the printed color—take comfort in the fact that you have chosen your color scheme responsibly. You have picked colors from printed samples, not from your screen.

Only one situation is an exception to this rule, and that’s when you’re using DRAW to produce artwork for an on-screen slide show, Web page, or other online presentation. In those cases, the monitor is your final output device, and you can choose any color that strikes your fancy.