What is wrong here?

<p>Hi All - I've spent much of the day printing out images for an upcoming gallery show. Everything has gone fairly well until I encountered a few recently made images. All the images in question feature fall colors and were made within the past few days. I managed to get all but one image to print correctly, but only after some messing around with color management. The attached image is driving me nuts! No matter what I do, this image prints only in shades of yellow/orange. The green trees are yellow/orange, the bark is deep orange, the sky is white and reddish (almost yellow). My monitor was calibrated correctly just this morning using the Spyder. The printer is the Canon i990, the monitor a Dell. All other images are printing in full color variation with no oddly colored areas and most are in similar colors (fall colors of red, yellow and orange against green or blue backgrounds) and no other image is giving me trouble. Can someone, please, tell me what they heck is happening here? <img src="https://picasaweb.google.com/101066039030967309818/20121026?authkey=Gv1sRgCIiu5pS32ene0wE" alt="" /></p>

<p>Jeebeejee...I'm bating a huge ZERO tonight! I'm not sure what went wrong, but obviously, you can't view the problem image and now I'm on my laptop and the image is on the desktop and I'm not heading back to the office until later...oh pooh- I apologize for the confusion and for wasting your time and the space. I'll try to repost this thread and the right image later tonight.</p>

<p>Your pic is a layered tiff file, which is why it won't display. I made an adjustment to the curves layer which may be more to your liking. If you like it send me an email and I'll return the layered tiff file, with the adjusted layer.<br>

If you remove a lot of red from the low midtones, and add a bunch of blue to the shadows you'll do most of what I did.</p>

<p>Peter</p>

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<p>Problem seems to be heavy clipping in the yellows. </p>

<p>Thank you for the help. I really am a wreck today! Not only did I not upload the image correctly, I haven't explain the issue clearly. Let me try again: I've printed about twenty images today and this single image is the only one causing me trouble. Peter, the adjustments you suggest have already been made to the image (unfortunatly because I messed up the uploaded image, you can't see these adjustments clearly). I am reposting both the original image and a second image similar to the first in an effort to make this a bit clearer. About half the images printed today feature fall scenes with colors similar to those in the original image and all of these printed correctly - including the second image attached here. This isn't so much an issue of the final print not matching the monitor image, it's more an issue of the final print not matching anything - every part of the image is printing orange. What the heck is that about? I'm feeling really stupid tonight, so I'm attaching the two images below - thanks folks!</p><div></div>

<p>Earth to Irene. Your image looks fine. Just turn down the saturation a bit. When you're in a canopy of yellow/orange you're going to get yellow/orange. A little pump-up of the blue might help the sky but siince I can't see the rest of your series I can't tell how far off the mark (compared to the rest of the images in the series) you are.</p>

<p>Thanks John for the ideas - I am still being really unclear about what is the trouble. Let me try once more to make this clear: (I only fault myself, not you folks, I'm just having trouble explaining the problem). I'm not concerned with how the image appears on the monitor or online. The saturation probably does need some adjustment; however, the problem is that of the series of images, the single image that does not print correctly is the first one I posted. It's not that the colors don't match the monitor (I'd suspect a calabration error in that case). When I say that the image prints all orange I do not mean that objects in the image that should be blue or another color are "off". Instead I mean that the entire image prints orange - no defination, no almost right, but not quite color, I mean orange everything. It's as if the printer is somehow only using red and yellow to print the entire image. Since it only happens with this one image, I can easily eliminate the image, but I would like to understand what happened so that should it occur again, I would know what to do. Trying to explain problems such as this is really hard online because you can't see what I'm doing and cannot see the RAW file in order to view how the colors were captured.</p>

<p>Maybe a stupid question, but was this the last image you printed...and what do your ink levels look like? Have you run out of any inks in your set? I'm not a printing expert, so ignore if this is indeed a stupid question. Good luck!</p>

<p>Any chance the color space could be messed up for that one image, e.g., you accidentally "assigned" it to some oddball color space when you intended to "convert" it? </p>

<p>Unfortunately, I'm working on a friend's laptop, so I don't have my usual toolkit to look at your images.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>Sometimes the problem requires one to go all the way back to Raw and adjust exposure compensation, especially in high contrast situations.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>As Daniel suggested, check ink levels and do a test print to check for clogging. If necessary do a cleaning cycle.</p>

<p>"... this image prints only in shades of yellow/orange. The green trees are yellow/orange, the bark is deep orange, the sky is white and reddish (almost yellow)."<br />"... I do not mean that objects in the image that should be blue or another color are "off". Instead I mean that the entire image prints orange - no defination, no almost right, but not quite color, I mean orange everything."</p>

<p>Irene<br /> The reality of the situation is that your image <em>is</em> extremely yellow/orange. Your printer is probably printing it correctly.<br /> Please post the original "problem" file so we can see it. You said that I couldn't see the image because you uploaded it incorrectly, it did upload to Pnets servers, it just didn't display. I was able to download the file and look at it, and it is extremely yellow/orange.</p>

<p>Forgive me if I'm being obtuse, but if you color correct the file, then compare it to your original file, you'll see that it's obviously too yellow and red.</p>

<p>I'll post mine again compared to yours. I've corrected my version a little more than previously to improve the colors even more than before.</p>

<p>Peter</p>

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<p>Once again, your yellow ink levels are consistently at 100%. </p>

<p>Okay guys - I'm still not sure what the heck happened with that one image; however, I suspect that a number of factors were at work and you mention most of them. First: I checked my ink and then the nozzles and ran a cleaning cycle just in case this might be the problem. Since every image in this series is of the same area and because most contain the same colors or at least similar colors, the fact that only one image shows as over in yellow and orange, didn't make much sense to me. If the colors were consistenly off, then every image should print with the colors off. Thankfully, I generally bracket my images and in this case I had a total of four RAW files from which to work. I selected a second RAW file of the same image, processed it normally and sent it to the printer as a draft. Bang - the image printed exactly the way I wanted. The greens are green, reds-red, yellow correct and not overpowering, the trees are clearly defined, the leaves sharp and clean and the sky (tiny bit of sky) shows as the correct blue. In short, the image looks good to my eye. I'm still unsure what happened with that one image, but at least now I have a decent looking image with correct colors.<br>

Les - I did look at the image data and color histogram and note the extreme yellow - don't know why this appeared in this image and not the others in the same bracket sequence, but...there is much about the digital darkroom I'm still struggling to master.<br>

Thank you, everyone, for your help and insights.</p>

 

<p>I actually had this similar type of occurrence once when printing a lot of pictures. It was as though my printer had an absolute melt-down. I simply shut off the printer AND the computer, waited a couple of days and went back to it. Printed fine. I never did figure out why it happened, but apparently it was something to do with overloading the transmittal between the computer and the printer.</p>

<p>Kathy - this is what sometimes drives me batty about computers in general and digital darkroom work specifically - you encounter a serious problem, try every solution you can dream of and nothing works. You then shut the system down, walk away and when you come back, in an hour or ten days, the problem has disappeared. You never learn what went wrong or how to fix the problem should it reoccur. Oh well - at least my print job is done and the images are hanging in the gallery.</p>