Color calibration is a lovely exercise in… hair loss. I wonder if racists feel this more. Now, why do I go on and say something like this. This post was supposed to be about colors in digital painting vs. their print versions. Promise. No race politics here.
You paint something digitally – choosing, or if you’re a floundering goose like me and blissfully creating on the fly, a color palette, hoping what will result is your vision come to life, or something you can safely label thus without an accompanied bout of cringing.
Once it’s “done”, you’re happy it’s out of you, this face that’s been haunting you, with how it looks, with the color story and what it means to you…
After a short stint of habitual/ritual (eenie-meenie) procrastination, you, all red-eyed and bushy browed venture to the (most reasonable) printers and go about printing a sample. At this point you’re really confident and about as chuffed as a raccoon about to discover a dumpster next to a 5 star. You speak to the technician, sitting behind his shoulder like an annoying gnat – watching every mouse click with beady little eyes as he sets your precious up for the print – assuring him that it’s indeed made using CMYK profile (duh, you’re an artist – this you know), reminding him more than the requisite number of times to add the ‘cutting marks’ with a border, rechecking the type of paper and finish, and then you finally leave him be and find yourself an ubiquitous stained plastic chair and wait for the print to come through… And let me tell you, it is a wait. Like as you might, you’re not the most important client around. Turns out, samples for fledgling artists don’t make for the most lucrative business, and you are periodically competing with pointy shoed restaurant managers printing mounds of misspelled menus or a hapless office administrator strenuously over-designing stacks of gaudy certificates. But after a seemingly interminable length of time – there it is! Your glorious masterpiece as it would appear… in washed out hell.
At this point, because you’re a dumb noob, your iPad is safely at home and you can’t really verify the print against it. You’re standing very still in that small, dingy room redolent of a hair-raising mix of ink, sambar and stale sweat, trying to avoid taking one too many breaths, and thinking to yourself, “Did I make this? Did what I make really look like this?”
You have been let down yet again by your aging memory and/or eyesight and as you peer into this piece of paper in your hands, you’re beginning to feel that hair dislodge itself from its follicle while you glumly resign yourself to the vagaries of digital printing. Maybe this is the best it would look – maybe you should’ve hand-painted instead and digitized after… Oh well.
This dramatic and intensely useless epiphany lasts all of five minutes. If you’re an artist you’re likely stubborn and impetuous in equal parts – and you didn’t just spend 75 hours squinting into Procreate for nothing.
What follows is a Rambo-worthy montage of doggedness. You don’t have Photoshop or any fancy calibration software, so you set about it like a fiend. Playing around with the settings, adjusting things you didn’t know existed, checking the image on different devices until your eyes are bloodshot, and vowing in frantic muttered breaths to invest in a good printer instead of food for the foreseeable future, until finally… (okay this is very exaggerated – it’ll take you a few tries and a printing excursion) … finally you have it! You hit the golden ratio of settings which is unsurprisingly applicable to that image alone (you will definitely have to rinse and repeat for each piece) and with the help of an old Sony Vaio laptop which weirdly has the most accurate representation of what the print will look like, you’re good to go! 😁
So ladies and gents – what you see on the iPad is not how I actually made it, it is what I had to tweak and make it look like for it to look like what you see in print (which is what I had made it originally) – you follow? Cause I don’t.
Anyhoo, point of this post is: What we see is not always what is – sometimes it will take a few tries, and more often than not, it will take you changing a few settings to see things clearly.
Priya Goswami 
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