Why does my scanner change the color of my photos

The reasons are pretty easy to explain. I've broken them into technical and non-technical.

Non-Technical Reasons your scanner changes the color of your photos.

• Your monitor is not set correctly. Your monitor is not normally set up well when it comes from the computer manufacturer. If you buy my scanner calibration kit, I include instructions for getting your monitor close without having to spend big-bucks on characterization hardware and software.

• Your printer is probably not set up right for printing photo quality. It also tends to print things a bit dark. My book on scanners, printers and more covers photo editing and printing by concentrating on the tools that bring you the best results. Fast!

• Most scanning needs some photo editing to fix colors that may not reproduce well. Most people notice it with particularly memorable colors. Computers, scanners and printers can't render all of the original photo colors equally well.

  Technical reasons why your scanner changes the color of your photos.

• An out of gamut color. Either the printer, computer or sometimes even the scanner can't capture that color. To see if it's the printer, take the scan to a photo processor and see if they do better. On low-cost scanners it is very likely that the scanner didn't capture the color accurately. This does happen on expensive scanners, but much less so above $1000.

• Color mangement. It's funny to me that so many photo editing or desktop publishing software titles have pretty good color support while all bets are off for Windows peripherals. Even on the the Macintosh this is a problem. Less so because they rely on Apple's good color management policies, but it's still an issue.