There’s a moment in time that only happens when you hold a finished photograph in your hands. Not the version on the screen but the physical print, fixed in ink and paper. The image stops being an arrangement of pixels and becomes an object – a genuine piece of physical art. Weight, texture, surface, reflectance: all the things a monitor can’t simulate suddenly come to the fore.
On screen, a photograph is fleeting – and that kind of transient art is absolutely legitimate in its own right, but it’s always just one slider away from being something else. A print is a commitment. It’s the point where I say this is the version I believe in, and that commitment exposes all the weaknesses in my workflow. A slight colour cast I never noticed on the monitor becomes obvious. Shadows that looked rich on screen collapse into mush. A highlight that felt delicate suddenly blows out.
The print doesn’t pull any punches – it just lays everything out on the table, quite literally, for all to see.
That honesty is what pulled me back into profiling. I realised that if I wanted my prints to carry the same intention as the images I view on screen, or share online, I needed to understand the relationship between my printer, my inks, and my papers. The print was telling me the truth about my images. I just had never really listened to it.
For me, the turning point came when I printed the same image on two different papers – both supposedly “neutral,” both using the manufacturer’s ICC profiles – and ended up with two completely different interpretations of the same file. One leaned warm, the other cool. One held the shadow detail beautifully, the other swallowed it whole. Neither matched the screen. Neither matched each other. And neither matched the version of the image I thought I’d made.
That was the moment I realised I wasn’t really in control of the process, but rather the process was in control of me. I was outsourcing the most important part of the workflow to a generic profile built for someone else’s printer, on someone else’s paper, using someone else’s inks.
Once you see that clearly, it’s impossible to unsee it. You start noticing all the little ways the print drifts away from the image you intended. A slight green tint in the midtones. A softness in the blacks that wasn’t there on screen. A subtle highlight that simply blows out on paper. None of these things are catastrophic on their own, but together they chip away at your confidence. You stop trusting the print. Worse, you stop trusting yourself.
And that’s when profiling stops being a technical curiosity and becomes something closer to self‑defence. I want the print to reflect my decisions, not the assumptions baked into a profile created in a different room, under different lighting, on a different machine. I want the paper to behave because I told it how to behave, not because I crossed my fingers and hoped the manufacturer’s idea of “neutral” happened to align with mine.
SpyderPRINT doesn’t ask me to tweak sliders or make educated guesses about colour casts. It asks for something much simpler and much more revealing: print its target with no colour management at all. The result is a sheet of several hundred coloured patches, and a second sheet containing fifty shades of grey – or rather 238 shades of grey, but that really doesn’t have the same ring to it, don’t you think? Together they form a fingerprint of how the printer behaves when nothing is compensating for it.
Once the target is printed, I leave it to dry. Not the impatient “wave it in the air and hope for the best” kind of dry, but a proper wait that lets the pigments settle and the paper reach its final state. Only then do I bring out the spectro.
Setting up the SpyderPRINT spectro is straightforward: calibrate it on its white tile, place it at the start of the first row, and steadily draw it across the patches. The software guides me with a reassuring beep when I’ve scanned a row cleanly, or a warning tone when I’ve drifted – which happens often. I fall into a rhythm: position, scan, lift, move to the next row. It’s methodical, almost mechanical, but in a satisfying way.
By the time I reach the final row, I’ve built up a complete set of measurements that describe exactly how that printer–paper combination behaves. SpyderPRINT takes those readings and turns them into an ICC profile – a tiny file that contains the digital fingerprint of my setup.
The first print I make with that profile is the payoff. The shadows open up. The highlights behave. The colour cast disappears. The print stops arguing with me and starts agreeing with the image I had in my head.
That’s the moment I realise profiling isn’t a chore at all. It’s just another enjoyable part of the craft – an inevitable extension of the fine‑art process. It’s the bridge between the photograph I imagine and the one I can hold.