Printer making photos darker - what's going on?

[june_daley]

<p>Hi guys,</p>

<p>OK I have read about monitor calibration but I'm an amatuer photographer and a bit clueless. I have been trying to print a nice photo of me holding a pink gerbera on my Canon ip4500. Looks great on my moniter, but when I print it out, it comes out really dark and the flower looks red, not pink. I have fiddled around changing the profiles in photoshop but it doesn't make much of a difference at all - still really dark on the printer (this is from my laptop AND from my completely seperate desktop computer.)</p>

<p>Any ideas what the problem could be, or where/how I should start investigating?</p>

<p>Thanks so much!<br>

Juen</p>

[patricklavoie]

<p>1_do you have a hardware calibrated monitor?</p>

<p>2_do you use the correct paper profile for your ink / paper combo?</p>

<p>Without answering YES to BOTH those questions, you wont have anything good, or you wont be able to trust what you see on both of them.</p>

<p>Amateur or not, its the basic of the digital darkroom..you just CANT go without it.</p>

[june_daley]

<p>no on the monitor, yes on the correct paper profile. Something to consider.. thanks for the advice!</p>

[patricklavoie]

<p>no need to buy a new laptop.</p>

<p>1_a better external display would really help, like a Dell UltraSharp 24inch or similar.</p>

<p>2_BUT a hardware device for your calibration such as a Spider3 Pro or a Eye1 Display 2 would seriously help getting better rendition of what you see on screen.</p>

<p>Your print is darker than what? from what you remember of the scene? or from what you see on your laptop display whos probably too bright?...</p>

[howard_m]

<p>listen to what Patrick says. unless you're willing to have a calibrated screen, you're just wasting time, paper and ink. </p>

[drew_hendrix]

<p>The "prints are too dark" problem has everything to do with monitor calibration. However, even if you cannot immediately buy the device to calibrate your display, one thing you can do it check the brightness of your screen. Simply turning your brightness down might help quite a bit. Try setting it near zero and make a print.<br /> <br /> It's not a perfect fix but it will probably give you a better idea what your image will look like when printed.<br /> <br /> Regards profiles in Photoshop - as a "beginner", you should set the working space to Adobe RGB and leave it there. Any profiles that have a name of a paper in them should only be used in the printing process. In other words, printer profiles are not for use as display or working space profiles. Yes they are used in soft proofing but that should come later in your learning curve.</p>

[g dan mitchell]

<p>Yes to most of what I read above, particularly the need to calibrate your monitor and use correct paper/printer profiles.</p>

<p>However, realize that ultimately while a monitor can give you a very good indication of what your print might look like you actually need to make a print to verify. By their natures, a backlit projected image will not look the same as a front lit image created by placing pigments on paper.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

[dave_redmann]

<p><strong>* * * Opinion to the contrary alert! * * *</strong></p>

<p>There are lots of people around here who preach the need for calibration and color management, but for the average person, IMO they're wrong. The average person does not need color management or calibration or anything. All the average person needs is either to adjust his monitor with the built-in settings and/or experiment a little bit to get a feel for the relationship between what something looks like on the monitor and what the corresponding print looks like.</p>

<p>I have tweaked my monitor settings, just using its built-in controls (brightness, contrast, color temperature). I send out files to get prints from a variety of services, and in almost all cases tell them 'no corrections', that is, they print my file as they get it. The prints almost always look fine, and are never <em>way</em> off. I have printed with others' inkjets, and the results may not be great (often due to a lack of proper paper/ink profiles for the printer), but have never been that bad.</p>

<p>Why similar relative ease of reasonable succcess should not also apply to printing at home with a photo inkjet printer--as long as you take the very basic step of telling the software what ink and paper you are using (which June evidently did)--is something nobody can adequately explain (because I'm pretty sure it isn't true). I suspect that what often happens is that people have their monitors <em>way</em> out, far too bright, and then actually lower the brightness of the image so that it looks good on their screens, with the result that the print looks bad. The same sorts of problems can plague contrast, color balance, etc.</p>

<p>So June, this is what I suggest: make sure your printer is loaded with the correct Canon inks, and preferably Canon paper. Go outside on a sunny day and take a picture with your camera on full-auto mode. Print the camera-generated JPEG without making any adjustments. Does it look about right? If so, the problem is not that your printer prints to dark; it may well be that you're messing up the files by adjusting them on a monitor that is way out, and if so, take the print you just got and adjust your monitor until it more-or-less matches that print.</p>

<p>As a further test, send the camera-generated, unedited JPEG to Mpix or somewhere like that and get them to make you a print with 'no corrections'. Does it look good?</p>

 

[alan_goldhammer]

<p>You can do a somewhat passable job manually. The big issue is getting the display to the right brightness level. See <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/dp/Epson3800/printworkflow.html#display_calibration">Eric Chan's </a>page on profiling a monitor on how you can do this using your digital camera in spot meter mode (or if you have a external light meter, that will work as well). there are other "eye" tests that you can perform as well from Norman Koren's website that Eric references. Won't be as good as a hardware implemented profile of your monitor but may give you the results you are after. the one problem with what Dave R. says immediately above is that the JPEG that comes from your camera is what Canon thinks you will like; not what you like (but it could be that you will).</p>

[roger_smith4]

<p>I don't think you can manually calibrate LCDs as they lack much in the way of real hardware controls. I tried to do this with a low-end ViewSonic and just knocking the brightness down made uncorrectable color casts. I used to do this with a CRT with some success, but have since bought an Eye One Display for $80 and have not looked back.</p>

[alan_goldhammer]

<p>Regarding Roger's comment on manual calibration, there are some low end LCDs that you can calibrate manually. I had a 19 inch Samsung that had enough controls to allow for manual calibration. The colors were better than OK and the most important thing was getting the brightness down correctly. I used the light meter approach noted above and it worked. Since upgraded the monitor to the NEC P221 with the hardware calibration package and it gives superior results. My comment was more directed at the poster who indicated she is an amateur in search of a better picture. She didn't give us a budget to play around with.</p>

[june_daley]

<p>Just briefly reading over the above responses - the first thing I did was adjust the brightness of my laptop screen - this didn't seem to make a difference, the pinks in the photo still looked the correct pink. When printed they are coming out red. This has to do with correct calibration, right?</p>

<p>Thanks for the answers will take a better look after work - very helpful, thanks!</p>

[howard_m]

<p>the brightness will only affect the 'print is too dark'. </p>

<p>WRT pink printing as red, that is a monitor calibration issue or how you have the printer setup WRT to using the proper printer/paper profiles along w/ the application setting the color control, not the printer (or worse, BOTH)</p>

[arkady ten]

<p>It might be also<br>

a. double colormanagement<br>

b. gamut mapping <br>

issues. </p>

<p>Make sure that you use only printer driver CM or only PS CM (preferrable) and not both. <br>

Check in PS if your pink is an in-gamut color. </p>

[roger_smith4]

<p>I wouldn't trust a laptop monitor for precise colors. You just don't know where the laptop's ability to display colors ends. There have been a number of posts about inaccurate purple/blues. It was issues like this that made me stop trying to use a laptop for photo editing.</p>