It’s frustrating, wasteful, and expensive in ink, materials, and time. You go to immense trouble to get a high quality scan with the maximum well-graduated tonal information. You spend hours finely adjusting those image tones to perfection on screen. The monochrome picture looks exactly as you want it on your computer monitor. You carefully set the printer to produce its finest quality, take a deep breath, and click the Print button. Out comes a print that looks nothing like the screen! You then spend fruitless hours and trial prints trying to adjust the printer driver controls to make the print look like the monitor, or hours with adjustment curves on the image itself to alter the look of the printed output. You finally manage it, but the curve adjustments meant you had to work in 8 bit, not 16, which is essential for fine monochrome prints, and when you print on another paper, with another ink, or with another printer, the whole frustrating rigmarole has to be undergone all over again.

You can drive yourself silly trying to adjust printer settings to match the final printed image to the one you see on your monitor. Fortunately, there is a far simpler way. MonoMatch©

Though you are working in monochrome, the trouble is caused by the lack of co-ordinated specific colour management profiles from scanner to PC/monitor, and from PC/monitor to printer. If we were actually working in colour, the problem would be worse, yet more obvious. It wouldn’t be just tones that varied from screen to print, but colours too. There are generic ICC colour profiles available, but every device is different. For instance, if you print the same file from the same PC on two printers nominally of the same make and type using the same inks, the printed results will normally be noticeably different.

The traditional way to handle this problem in colour is use a colour management system, then to calibrate each device (scanner, PC/monitor, and printer), and to generate accurate custom colour profiles for each. This method works. Unfortunately, if a different ink, paper, or printer is used, each will require a new profile - and they are not cheap. This system will make each device in the chain reproduce colours exactly like the previous device in the chain. If you work in colour, this is really still the only reliable method. (Don’t even try to print a greyscale image on an inkjet printer using all the colour inks, which is necessary to get a smooth image – using black alone gives an unpleasantly grainy appearance. It is virtually impossible to get a monochrome image without unpleasant and unpredictable colour casts printing with colour inks. Use specific monochrome inks from companies like MIS or Lyson or the Piezography system. However, the Fine Print system below will still work with inkjet manufacturers’ colour inks when printing monochrome if you choose to go that route).

You don’t need to spend money on custom colour profiles!
For fine monochrome, with the Fine Print MonoMatch©, you don’t need any of this expense and hassle. Make any print/paper/printer combination look exactly like your monitor simply, quickly, easily, and economically on PC or Mac. Just follow the logical step-by-step method. CD with full instructions, both printed and on screen, only £12 inc. p&p UK (Europe £13, USA/Canada £14, Rest of World £15).

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