If you are planning on doing your own imaging work with Photoshop and having us output your files for you, there are a number of guidelines we would suggest following in order to have the best chance of making the prints match your monitor.

First, you should do all of your work on a calibrated monitor. Ideally you will use a monitor calibration kit, such as the Spyder/Optical package from Colorvision, to do this. If you do not perform this critical step, it is unlikely that what you see on your monitor will match our prints. Even if you are relatively certain a good match exists, we strongly recommend doing some kind of hard proof before printing larger final prints. We also suggest using our printer profiles in Photoshop to perform soft proofing and out of gamut checks. Your Photoshop manual contains instructions about how to do this.

Before starting an editing session, let your monitor warm up at least 30 minutes (if using a CRT monitor). Work is best performed in a room with controlled, subdued lighting. Examination of proofs for comparison with the monitor is best done using some kind of color balanced task lighting. Inexpensive versions of these are available at www.soluxtli.com or www.fullspectrumlighting.com.

Picking the correct temperature and gamma to calibrate your monitor to is important to promote accurate matching between monitor and print. There is no one correct setting. Generally, it is good to select a gamma of 2.2. Choosing correct monitor temperature is a more complex task. To be precise, one should select a temperature on the monitor such that the white displayed on your monitor matches the white of the paper you are printing on when viewed in the light you will be making comparisons in. Typically this temperature will be in the 5000-6500K range. You may have to do some test printing on a particular printer and paper to determine which monitor temperature yields the closest match. Having a monitor that allows you to individually adjust the R, G, and B gain controls makes it a little easier to make small adjustments to the monitor to target specific printers/papers.

You may choose to use softproofing with our printer profiles in Photoshop to check on how the printing process might alter the image in an RGB file. These profiles might show a significant change in how the image will actually print. Ultimately the best test is to do a small proof print, as the monitor will never perfectly reflect how the print will look.