Photography

Hopefully this is a good place to ask this question.

I think of myself as "generally tech-savvy", at least in some ways. But my expertise is way more STEM-y and less related to any artistic pursuits than maybe this calls for, so this particular problem is well outside my area of expertise and I haven't been able to solve it satisfactorally.

My mother has been warring with the problem of colors not being the same between her monitor and her printer for a very long time. She doesn't do photography per se (but I figured probably if any community would have expertise that could help, it'd probably be this one), but she does a lot of crafts that involve printing stuff. Right now, the main craft she's into in that area is that she's decorating a dollhouse and wants to print wallpaper to affix to the walls. It's all mid-century modern and she's pretty picky about the color scheme.

Her concern is that when she makes or finds an image that looks good on her computer and prints it, the result from the printer looks "pink-tinted" relative to what's on the screen. The hue is off.

I've done a good amount of research on the subject and advised her on how to try to resolve the issue. First she got a SpyderExpress Colorimeter to calibrate her monitor. That one doesn't support calibrating the printer, but it was (relatively) cheap and I thought maybe it would be good enough. The profile I got from that definitely changed the colors on the screen, but the result wasn't really any closer to what was on the printed page. So she got a Calibrite ColorChecker Stuido which does support calibrating both monitor and printer. (Even projectors, which is cool, but irrelevant to my question.) Using both the monitor profile and the printer profile produced by the Calibrite device and software still didn't give great results.

Side note: she's on a Windows 11 laptop, and of course built-in laptop screens don't typically support things like color adjustment or anything. So I lent her an external monitor for these experiments. It's a cheap, fairly old ViewSonic LCD monitor (a VS15451 if that helps any). Not to use forever, but at least to validate whether an external monitor with more controls than the built-in laptop monitor would be likely to have some success. This monitor does support things like tweaking the individual R, G, and B channels of the output. I spent a good deal of time tweaking everything to be exactly as the Calibrite software asked and all. But didn't get result that matched well between the monitor and printed page.

Another side note: She doesn't have Photoshop and doesn't really want to invest in Photoshop. She's using Paint.net primarily. And mostly the experiments we've done used a Brother color laser printer on regular typing paper. (She wants to use the laser printer in partiulcar because the pigments won't run/bleed if you use glue on it.)

My mother's pretty frustrated with all of this and she can't imagine that, say, professional photographers could possibly have to tweak colors and "guess" what the image will look like when it comes out the printer, so she thinks surely there must be some solution.

Mind you, I understand that there are colors that monitors can't produce and colors that printers can't produce, and which ones can't be produced may not line up. (Plus the monitor is backlit and paper isn't and that of course will affect what colors each medium can produce. Also, the lighting in the room can make a difference as far as color perception is concerned.) She doesn't really understand that. (Like, it kindof doesn't compute to her that a hex code isn't some universal, objective standard of color.) But still, I'd think she should be able to get better results than she's getting.

Also, I guess I'll mention that she does have cateracts and good reasons why she can't have them treated at this particular time. But her perception of the difference in color between what comes out of the printer and what appears on screen (whether with or without applying the Calibrite-produced color profiles) seems greater than mine. But... is it unreasonable to think that isn't "the whole issue" because catacts should be expected to reduce the perceived difference btween colors rather than increase it? (I hope the admission that she has cataracts won't make everybody throw up their hands and withold any other helpful advise. I don't have cataracts and again, I feel like probably we should be able to get better results than we're getting.)

I'll mention that the other thing she doesn't really "get" is that changing how the monitor displays colors (by applying a color profile, say) won't change what comes out of the printer when you print. She's asked me several times after recalibrating a monitor "ok, now print it out again and let's see how it looks". I have to remind her that if I print it out again using the same printer profile, it'll produce the exact same image in exactly the same colors. Also, I've had to explain to her that after applying a monitor color profile, the image won't look like it does now, and even if you did have color parity between monitor and printer, you'd have to edit the colors on the image after applying the monitor profile to look "how you want".

I also tried taking a photo of a printed page next to the monitor to show the color disparity here, but the difference in color on the photo is basically imperceptable (but in person it's not).

I guess my question at this point is: is there any hope of getting better color parity than what I've tried has produced, and if so, what would be my best direction to go?

I guess the approaches I have in mind off the top of my head are:

• Better/different monitor.
• Better/different printer. (Maybe inkjet is better for color? I dunno.)
• Better/different paper.
• Better/different colorimeter?
• Better/different computer? (I mean, Macs have a reputation for being good for this kind of thing, but I can't imagine that getting better color parity on a Windows machine would be a complete no-go.)
• Maybe I'm missing something super basic and I just need a little more knowledge.
• Maybe we're just being unrealisticly picky about color parity?
• Maybe nothing can be done without cataract surgery?

She's asked that I pick out a new monitor that may fix the issue, but we've sunk a fair amount of money into things we thought should help and at this point I'm not terribly confident that just throwing more money at the problem without getting better information from someone with expertise in the area will help.

If you do end up recommending that we purchase a product, I'd appreciate specific model recommendtations. (Like, if we should get another colorimeter, which specific one? Or if we need a better monitor, which one would you recommend?)

Definitely if there's more info I can provide, please ask! And thanks in advance for any advice you can provide!