please help a beginner : why my prints lack brightness?

<p>if that is not enough, then maybe you need to find a better paper printer combination. </p>

<p>Christa - have you tried going to 'sharpen' and 'unsharp mask' and then setting amount to 20, radius to 50 and threshold to 0? The results may surprise you. You can give your pic several dollops of the USM and then remove some of them in 'edit' until the pic looks OK. Maybe you should first give the pic 100/1/0 in USM before going to the 20/50/0.</p>

<p>Let's face it. Getting critically good output from a printer is difficult. Profiling services and calibration instrument manufacturers would like you to believe that they can solve all of your print problems for you. They can't. They can only assist you is developing a reliable work environment.</p>

<p>Tom, Luke, and Chris are correct. Monitor calibration, printer calibration, and color profiles all assist in creating a reliable working environment, but print output will not exactly match monitor display. You will have to adjust the image differently for the intended output.</p>

<p>What all that calibration and profiling does is ensure that, once you determine the optimum settings for the intended output, you can be confident that those settings will work for you consistently in the future. It takes a bit of patience and a good deal of ink and paper (and a notebook to record your settings for different paper manufacturers, paper finishes, print sizes, and expected display lighting conditions), but once you are done, you will be able to print with more confidence that output will match expectation.</p>

<p>Even then, the first print is not usually the final print, because, until you get the print on paper, allow it to cure for 24 hours, and get it under intended lighting for the first time, you cannot anticipate ALL problems that may arise. Intended lighting for a print becomes a part of the print process as well. I have seen beautiful prints that have been very carefully lit in studios lose their impact when purchased and displayed under different lighting.</p>

<p>As soon as you become truly critical about printed output, printing becomes EXPENSIVE! It is rare that the first print to come out of the printer satisfies you completely. Several tweaks are usually in order before a satisfactory print is produced, and even then, there will be optimal display conditions for it.</p>

<p>I think these Epsons aren't well calibrated out of the box. With my 2880 I couldn't get satisfactory results until I brought my monitor's brightness down to 89 cd/m. It was so hard trying to adjust an image on the screen knowing you have to account for the fact that all prints are a certain percentage darker than what's on the monitor.</p>

<p>So I tried it at 89 and bam!, no more rejects. I light my framed prints well, and this is the only way I could get consistent results (B&W and color, Exhibition Fiber, Premium Luster and Prem. Photo)..</p>