How do you match printer and monitor colour? (1 Viewer)

[Rob Gillespie]

Apart from 'tweaking the knobs' in a totally random fashion on the printer driver controls, is there a SIMPLE way of getting the colours on Epson Photo 890 to match (as closely as possible) those on my Mitsubishi 19" monitor?

I know they can't be deadly accurate, but I'm finding that skin tones are way off. I seem to have got the contrast and brightness pretty much the same, but it's the colours I'm having trouble with. A tanned skin tone, which has a nice warm (brown) hue to it on the screen, comes out too 'pink' and lacks the brown element.

The monitor has it's colour temp at 6500k and I'm checking the printed results with normal daylight coming in throug the window. Trying to match with normal room lighting is difficult at best.

I found a very detailed method on normankoren.com but it goes into so much detail that it's going way over my head.

So has anyone managed to get the match right? How?

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Simple? No

My friend is a professional illustrator, and he uses PANTONE RGB value cards that are basically "Use this RGB value for this printed color"

I think the set is around $100