Bard Hill - Printer Calibration Sheet

Calibrating an inkjet printer to produce good photo-realistic prints is a complex business, and for the best results you need to look carefully at ICC colour profiling and do a lot of testing. However, there is one easy step that will make a big difference to anyone’s prints all by itself, and is also a valuable first step for those wanting to go the whole way.

This easy step is getting the shadow level right. A decent computer monitor, properly calibrated, will show ‘blacks’ steadily going from darker and darker grey till they become full black - this can be represented as a percentage of black, and on the monitor the difference between 99% and 100% black should still be just discernible. Your printer, however, can’t do this: anything darker than somewhere in the mid 90s is likely to reproduce as solid black.

What this means is that when you print a photograph on your ‘photo-realistic’ inkjet, subtle detail in your shadows will be lost: whether the original pixels were ‘almost black’, ‘nearly black’, or ‘really black’, they’ll all print as a solid 100% black. The way to deal with this starts with printing a test sheet for each combination of printer ink-set and paper that you use in order to identify where this cut-off occurs. Different papers and inks react differently, so it is important to do it for each combination.

The test image you need to use for this is not difficult to prepare, but it is time consuming. So I am offering you the opportunity to save yourself some trouble by downloading the one I use, which you will find, with basic advice on use, on the next page. This image also has some other uses, including checking highlight reproduction, the smoothness or otherwise gradients and how well dithering reproduces the RGB colours.