In this article we'll go through some very simple tips to get your screens looking as close to the resulting prints as possible.
Please note, this topic is extremely deep and technical, our approach below is to cover 3 main steps that will give you the most benefit without too much effort.
Step 1: Calibrate Your Monitor
This is the most important step. We highly recommend to have your monitor calibrated. There are services in most local areas that will do this for you, or you can purchase your own device (we recommend products from the brands X-Rite or Calibrite, both make monitor calibration devices that work very well).
If you do not have access to the above options, the best tip we can give is lowering the backlight or brightness of your monitor, it varies by monitor to what level but on average lowering it to 50% will significantly help in getting your screen looking closer to what a printed result will be. If the backlight/brightness is at 100% it overcompensates for the actual colours in the file and images can look darker or dull when compared to this, so reducing the backlight/brightness first and then editing your files is the best way to get a much more accurate result.
Step 2: Use ICC profiles for soft proofing
You can email us and request ICC profiles for our paper prints and canvas prints, with these you can soft proof your images in Photoshop or similar programs to get an indication of some of the adjustments that will occur.
Here's Adobe's guide on how to soft proof https://helpx.adobe.com/au/photoshop/using/proofing-colors.html
Step 3: Use real prints to adjust your monitor
This is the final step to get some fine-tuned adjustments happening.
It does require you to purchase some sample prints but once you have prints from us (or any supplier), hold them near your monitor and make some manual adjustments to your monitors settings, the key areas to adjust are Contrast, Brightness, Colour Temp and the RGB colours. Each monitor will have a different range of settings, so ideally yours will allow you to access all of these.
Keep in mind these adjustments should only be slight, especially if you have calibrated your monitor with a 3rd party device as in step 1. If you are needing to do major adjustments to get anywhere near the prints, then you'll be better off recalibrating your monitor first before doing so.
Using these steps you can achieve a pretty good result, without too much effort. If you'd like to discuss anything about colour management, we're happy to provide more information. Please contact us.