If you have ever designed a colour document on your computer and then printed it out on your inkjet or laser printer you may have noticed that the colours come out slightly different.  This is partly to do with the fact that  printing with ink on a piece of paper is a different process to creating colour on a computer monitor,  but it is possible to calibrate your monitor so that the colours match up as closely as they can.  This article gives you some tips on basic monitor colour calibration.

The colour on your Printer

Every printer uses slightly different inks and so the same ink combinations print out slightly different hues  on different printers.  Built into every Apple Computer is a technology called ColorSync which tries to address this problem.  ColorSync tries to match the colour on the screen with the colour that is printed on your printer so that if you choose a particular shade of green on your computer monitor, that same shade of green will be printed on the printer. It’s not failsafe, but it helps.

Apple computers come loaded with printer drivers for most printers, and these printer drivers contain the information that the computer needs to know how the printer will print certain colours.   Most printers will have a different colour profile for each type of paper you are printing on, so as long as you select the right type of paper (e.g. Gloss Photo, plain etc)  your Macintosh will know the colour that is being printed by the printer, and will try to match it to the screen.

The colour on your Monitor.

Different monitors display the same colours slightly differently. In most cases your OS X computer  will automatically detect the monitor  that is connected to it and use the correct colour profile for that monitor to try to match what you see to the colour that will print.  You can adjust the profile of monitor yourself and this article explains how.  What you see on your monitor is affected by your contrast and brightness settings, the age of your screen, the light in the room you’re working in, so it’s worth calibrating your monitor manually anyway.

Here’s  how to calibrate  your monitor using the built-in Apple calibration tool.

1.  Go to the Apple menu and open the System Preferences,  and click on “Displays”

2. Click on the ‘Color’  tab  and you will see a list of ‘profiles’  with one of them highlighted in grey. In my case ‘Cinema Display’ is  highlighted because I have an Apple Cinema Display.

Click on the color tab of the displays preference pane.

3. To manually calibrate your monitor, select ‘Calibrate’.  Don’t worry about losing your existing settings because at the end of the process you will be asked for a new name to save the new settings under. A calibration assistant will appear, choose ‘Expert Mode’ and then Continue.

There are 5 or 6 steps to the process, it will take you through them one by one, asking you to compare colours and move sliders. Sometimes it can help to squint.

Step 4 in the setup is called “Target Gamma”. Just go with the recommended 2.2.

Step 5 is Select Target White point. You will notice it dramatically changes what you see on the screen! It is trying to emulate the difference between looking at  a piece of paper under different lighting conditions. A piece of ‘white’ paper will be yellow or blue depending on the surrounding light conditions. White Point is setting the colour of your ‘white’. I suggest holding a white piece of paper up next to your monitor and matching the monitor white point to that. This way your monitor white point will be the natural whit point of your room. It may be that your room has an un-natural blue light and you’d prefer a more natural white point, it’s personal preference, but it will change the way you perceive colours on your monitor. I like to make a few different profiles with different white points and then I can easily switch between them. The standard white-point setting is 6500.

Step 7 is give it a name and then you are set.

I have my general monitor calibration setting. It’s set up for mainly internet work.

I also have one I use for professional printing jobs that I’ve tried to match to the printer I use.

Sending something off to get printed.

There are some colours that you can create on a monitor  that are impossible to print on a normal inkjet printer! For example certain oranges, fluorescent colours etc. The way the get these printed, for example on a logo, is that you specify the colour you want from a sample sheet of colours the printer gives to you. The printer then uses that coloured ink, rather than the normal CYMK ink. This is called spot colour. If you are doing a one colour logo or a T-Shirt you may want to choose a spot colour.

If you want to be certain of a particular CYMK colour you are printing you can get a pantone colour sheet from your printing company, it looks something like this:

Each colour entry tells you the CYMK values for that colour.

For example, here’s a sample orange colour from the printing company.

This means that if on your macintosh computer, you go to the colour picker in any program, and choose the CYMK sliders, you can set C to 0, M to 68, Y to 100 and K (black) to 0, and choose this exact colour.

Now that you have put in the exact colour by numbers, it doesn’t matter what it looks like on your screen or home inkjet printer. When you send it away and it gets printer by the printing company that sent you the chart, it will be EXACTLY that colour that you saw in their sample chart.

If you have a pantone colour chart from a printer (they are free -you just need to ask for one) you can put some of the colours into a color-filled box in a program like Pages and see how close your monitor (or home printer) is to the actual printed colours. This will give you an idea as to how well your monitor (or printer) is calibrated.

In the end, when doing Desktop Publishing, the main thing to remember is never trust your monitor, especially when choosing colours or editing photos, always check the colour of the printed out version.

If you’ve ever been given a pdf file that you want to edit, or a pdf form that you need to complete and return electronically, you’ll realise it’s not obvious how to edit a pdf file. The good news is that the OSX built in pdf reader app – ‘preview’ – can edit pdf files. You can’t move around or change what’s already in the pdf document, but you can add text and graphics. Here’s how. 
If you double click on any pdf file in OSX it will open in an application called preview. You can read the pdf and scroll around etc.

Go up to the View menu and select the menu item called ‘Show Annotations Toolbar. This will give you a toolbar along the bottom of your preview window to help you edit the pdf file.

After you select  the ‘View: Show Annotations Toolbar’ menu you will see a toolbar across the bottom of the preview window that looks like this:

These buttons will allow you to edit the pdf file. The left three buttons make an arrow, a circle or a rectangle. The fourth button along allows you to add text to the pdf.

If you click on the text box button – the 4th button across,  you can then go up to your document and add in a text box like this:

If you click on the text button you can add a text box to the pdf document like this.

This is a very easy way to fill in pdf files that are forms.

If you highlight the newly added text you can change the font by pressing Apple-T and the font window will appear.

You can’t delete  what’s already in a document, but you can draw a rectangle over it to hide it and type something new over the top.

You can cover over existing text using a rectangle with a white border like this.

You’ll notice you can’t change the rectangle color from being black, but you can put a very fat white border around it so it looks like a white rectangle!

If you want to totally change the images and text on an existing pdf file you will need an application like Adobe Illustrator that can actually edit the content of pdf files, but if you only want to make small changes the built in preview app will do the job!

iDisk is Apple’s online disk space that you get automatically if you sign up for MobileMe. iDisk is an easy was to share files that are too large to email. The limit for most email providers is 10MB, here you can upload files as large as your iDisk – 10GB. Here’s how.

 

1. To upload the file, in Safari go to https://www.me.com/idisk/ Put the file you want to share in the public folder. (If you are not logged in to MobileMe it will ask you to login.)

To upload a file, click on the upload icon.

2. To see the shared file, logout of mobile me and go to https://public.me.com/mobilemeid
(where mobilemeid is your mobile me ID)
Here anyone can see and download all the files in your public folder.
Simply click on the file to download it.

Sometimes you might come across a photo on a website and want to find the original version to see if it’s public domain or ask the original artist if you can use it. Tineye is a great service that let’s you do just that. You can upload any picture you’ve grabbed from a website to Tin Eye and it will find all the places that exact picture appears on the web. You can then sort by biggest image, and look for what might be the original place it came from.

There’s a safari plugin that will do this from Safari – go to the Safari menu then ‘Safari Extensions Gallery’ and search for Tineye and install the plugin. Then just right click on the image from any webpage to search in Tineye.

A photo object is a photo of an object without any background that you can can insert into a webpage or word processing document. Online clipart services such as photo.com and istockphoto have photo objects you can purchase, but here he’s how to make a photo object from any photograph using Pages, the standard OSX word processor.

Here is a photo of a camera, before and after we turn it into a photo-object.

Before

After

Step one is to open the image in pages. It helps if the background colour is different to the photo. For example if you have a black object on a black background it will be hard to differentiate the two.

Open the image in a new pages document

Next select “Instant Alpha” from the “Format” menu.

2. Select Instant Alpha from the format menu

The cursor will now turning to a cross-hair. Click anywhere on the background of the photograph behind the main object, an drag the cursor. This will cause the instant alpha tool to select all parts of the background that have a similar colour. You may need to do this multiple times if the background has various colours. Keep doing this until all the background has been selected. In the picture below you can see me highlighting a small section of the background in the middle of the photo – It is highlighted in pink.

Here I am selecting a part of the background using the instant alpha tool.

Once you have finished selecting all the background, click anywhere else in the pages document to finish the Instant Alpha process. You can now move the object wherever you want it in your pages document, or if you would prefer to use it elsewhere, for example in a webpage, simply take a screenshot using Shift-Apple-4 as described here, and this will save the image to your desktop.

Depending on what program you used to create a PDF, the file size of your PDF file can be quite large. If you combine two or three PDF files together using preview, you can also end up with a bloated PDF file.  The best way to reduce PDF file size is with Acrobat professional, which can do all sorts of magic on PDF files. But here is a free  way to make a PDF file smaller. Firstly, open the PDF file in ColorSync utility. The ColorSync utility is found in the utility folder of the applications folder of your computer. If you don’t know how to find that, simply right click ( or option click if you have a one button mouse) on the PDF file, and select from the menu open with,  ColorSync utility.

This will open your PDF file in colour sync utility. Go down to the bottom of the window to the drop-down menu on the left that says ‘Filters’  and select ‘reduce File Size’.  then click the button in the bottom right  of the window that says apply.

Select the filter that says reduce file size

This will go through and re-compress the images in your PDF to make the file size smaller.  Don’t forget to save the file after you’re finished,  you may want to use ‘save as’  so that you still keep the original copy of your PDF file.

My friend Dave has just moved across to mac and he tells me that in Microsoft publisher you can use a booklet template to make a booklet. By booklet I mean A4 pages folded in half to make an A5 booklet that you staple in the middle. To do this all the pages need to be re-ordered, for example, page 8 goes near page 1, page 2 near page 7 and so on. Publisher did this automatically.

With Pages in OS X there is no such built in option to do this automatically, but there is a great little program called ‘create booklet’ that will do it for you when you go to print the document.

You need to download a little program called ‘Create Booklet’ to do it. You can download it directly from here or go to the webpage here.

After you’ve downloaded it, Click on the ‘install- Create Booket PDF Service’
This will install an extra menu item in your printer menu to be able to print booklets.

After you’ve done this, go into Pages and select print, like you are going to normally print a document. But instead of pressing print (in the bottom right corner of the window) select the ‘PDF’ button in the bottom left, and click on ‘Create Booklet’

Your document will automatically be made into a booklet. It will open in a new window, and you can either ‘save’ it as a PDF file (to email to someone or print out later) or you can print it as a booklet to your printer.

Just remember that when you are designing a booklet, it will be printed smaller than usual. The A4 page you see on your screen will be printed on 1/2 an A4 page when you make a booklet, so make all the text a bit bigger than usual. Eg use a 16 point font instead of 12.

Note: There was an application called ‘Cocoa Booklet’ that used to do this but it doesn’t work in Snow Leopard, this is the new way of doing it.

Note: If you want to publish a book, and need a more professional binding solution try this program (it’s not free).