Anyone who has ever tried to reconcile an electronic image with nature will be familiar with the problem: The colors in the image almost always differ from what you see with your eyes. This problem has several causes. Colors are lost on the way from the camera to the image. The human eye adapts much better than a camera to different lighting conditions and automatically supplements missing information. Another problem is that color values often shift as the image makes its way through the chain of devices, from the camera, to the monitor, and finally the printer.

Each device can only absorb and process colors to a limited extent. Image-processing experts use the term gamut [1] to describe the possible colors a device can produce by internal mixing. Colors outside the gamut appear in replacement colors, which leads to distortions.

Different colors have different effects on the human eye. The eye is particularly sensitive to tones in the green range and can detect far more nuances of green in nature than a monitor shows. For mixed colors such as yellow – composed of green and red on the monitor – the printer may sometimes be better than the monitor assuming that this color is available as a process color.

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