Printing help

GhostInTheRuins

Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on this issue I've been having today.

Trying to print this image below:


But everytime I've printed it out, it looks more or less like this (Hard to get the white balance completely correct in the light I'm taking it at, but it's not too far off)



I've tried everything and I don't know what the problem is. The printer is a Canon IP4600, the inks are genuine canon, all almost full. The colour space I've used is the same for the printer, the software I printed and edited it with, and both monitors I used it on (one calibrated, one not calibrated). I tried printing it with different software, same result. I also presumed it was the non brand paper I was using, so I went and got some canon photo paper, exact same result.

So right now I'm at a loss for what could be wrong, is it just a dogdy printer? It used to print exactly what I saw on screen, and as far as I know absolutely nothing has changed.

Any ideas?

Heebie

You need your monitor to be calibrated, and ideally a color profile to convert your colors to before printing that was made on YOUR computer with YOUR printer, and the specific paper that you want to print on.

It can be complicated..and if you don't have the gear to build the color-profiles specifically for your printer & paper combination at your location, you're going to get less than perfect results.

I've got a Colormunki..which will do all of the above as long as the printer is connected to the computer you're printing from.. but they're not all that cheap. (A lot less expensive than an i1 with the full color-profiling package.)

Even something like a Colormunki is less-than-perfect because it doesn't use a calibration target for comparison against the printed target.. so it's less precise than the "full" i1 gear setup would be. (I used to use an i1 at work years ago..and it was fabulous.. and VERY VERY VERY accurate. I really did get pretty much what I saw on screen out of the printer, and my scans off my flatbed scanners were right on the mark for reflective materials too.. never got the company to spring for the targets to calibrate the film scanners though.)

That's a really nice image... very pretty..and it seems that some subtle blues & magentas in the petals are just missing in the print.. the print just looks red. (although that might just be the way it shot in the camera.) The print also looks like it might be a bit soft.. what resolution is the original? Are you perhaps printing from a screen-resolution file? (That would explain the softness.)

One other thing that might be coming into play is the lighting around where you use your monitor.. especially if it's an LCD. If the ambient lighting around your workstation changes.. you need to recalibrate your monitor (not nearly so much with CRT's as with LCD's) If you're near a window and the sun goes behind a cloud.. or comes out from behind one.. or someone turns on lights that weren't on when you calibrated your screen.. or shuts off lights that were on.. then your calibration is no longer accurate. The angle at which you view an LCD will also change the perception of what you're seeing.. and you might be seeing something with higher contrast than is actually in the file.

Another thing that could throw it off is the monitor gamma that you're calibrating too, and the color temperature that you're using as a target.. and whether or not you have control over elements of the display such as brightness & contrast, and you choose to adjust them beforehand. (If you use the automatic adjustments for ambient light on a MacBook Pro, for example.. what you see can be drastically different every few minutes if the lighting around you isn't stable.. or you put your hand over the wrong part of the body of the laptop.)

Perhaps one of us with calibration equipment to do both the screen AND the printer with consistent measuring equipment could drop by & give you a hand with that. (Using the same measuring device for the screen and the print output helps with consistency.. the calibration between an i1, a Colormunki, and a Spyder2 are probably even more different than if you checked against any 2 of the same device.. and 2 of the same device would still not be 100% spot-on to each other.)

stcstc

my quick first thoughts would be

1. the calibration looks off
2. what colour space are you working in, sRGB or adobeRGB
when your printing, I assume from photoshop, are you telling photoshop to manage colour and giving it a paper/printer profile?

3.I think that the colours could be outside the colour gamut of a lot of papers, the reds look very red for example. when you print, photoshop will shrink the colours to fit within the gamut of the paper, there are 4 ways to do this, in most cases perceptual is the way to do it
but i would think you might get some banding as the reds look so far out of gamut there will be a large amount shrinking of colours to bring them inside the colour gamut

hope this helps

GhostInTheRuins

Thanks for the replies guys!

stcstc wrote: »

my quick first thoughts would be

1. the calibration looks off
2. what colour space are you working in, sRGB or adobeRGB
when your printing, I assume from photoshop, are you telling photoshop to manage colour and giving it a paper/printer profile?

3.I think that the colours could be outside the colour gamut of a lot of papers, the reds look very red for example. when you print, photoshop will shrink the colours to fit within the gamut of the paper, there are 4 ways to do this, in most cases perceptual is the way to do it
but i would think you might get some banding as the reds look so far out of gamut there will be a large amount shrinking of colours to bring them inside the colour gamut

hope this helps

The calibration I don't think is too far off, I've calibrated my monitor a few times when I can get a loan of the equiptment off a friend. The first time I printed the image was off my non calibrated monitor, and I thought that that's what the problem was, but it looks more or less exactly the same on my calibrated monitor when I went to print off that too.

I'm using sRGB, both my monitors are set to use it, so are the programs (CS5 and Capture NX2) and my printer is set to print with it, is that the way it should be set up do you know? The thing I'm not sure about is the paper profile, is the paper profile the same as just setting the paper type you use when you're printing (glossy, matte etc) or is it more complcated than that?

Outside the colour gamut of the paper? To be honest that's the first time that I've heard that, and already I think that that might be the issue, because just the other day I printed a picture that was mostly green leaves, and it looks spot on, exactly as it looked on the screen, and nothing at all has changed since then. I've been printing it using perceptual, I must try the other three and see if that makes a difference at all.

Thanks for your help!

Heebie wrote: »

You need your monitor to be calibrated, and ideally a color profile to convert your colors to before printing that was made on YOUR computer with YOUR printer, and the specific paper that you want to print on.

It can be complicated..and if you don't have the gear to build the color-profiles specifically for your printer & paper combination at your location, you're going to get less than perfect results.

I've got a Colormunki..which will do all of the above as long as the printer is connected to the computer you're printing from.. but they're not all that cheap. (A lot less expensive than an i1 with the full color-profiling package.)

Even something like a Colormunki is less-than-perfect because it doesn't use a calibration target for comparison against the printed target.. so it's less precise than the "full" i1 gear setup would be. (I used to use an i1 at work years ago..and it was fabulous.. and VERY VERY VERY accurate. I really did get pretty much what I saw on screen out of the printer, and my scans off my flatbed scanners were right on the mark for reflective materials too.. never got the company to spring for the targets to calibrate the film scanners though.)

That's a really nice image... very pretty..and it seems that some subtle blues & magentas in the petals are just missing in the print.. the print just looks red. (although that might just be the way it shot in the camera.) The print also looks like it might be a bit soft.. what resolution is the original? Are you perhaps printing from a screen-resolution file? (That would explain the softness.)

One other thing that might be coming into play is the lighting around where you use your monitor.. especially if it's an LCD. If the ambient lighting around your workstation changes.. you need to recalibrate your monitor (not nearly so much with CRT's as with LCD's) If you're near a window and the sun goes behind a cloud.. or comes out from behind one.. or someone turns on lights that weren't on when you calibrated your screen.. or shuts off lights that were on.. then your calibration is no longer accurate. The angle at which you view an LCD will also change the perception of what you're seeing.. and you might be seeing something with higher contrast than is actually in the file.

Another thing that could throw it off is the monitor gamma that you're calibrating too, and the color temperature that you're using as a target.. and whether or not you have control over elements of the display such as brightness & contrast, and you choose to adjust them beforehand. (If you use the automatic adjustments for ambient light on a MacBook Pro, for example.. what you see can be drastically different every few minutes if the lighting around you isn't stable.. or you put your hand over the wrong part of the body of the laptop.)

Perhaps one of us with calibration equipment to do both the screen AND the printer with consistent measuring equipment could drop by & give you a hand with that. (Using the same measuring device for the screen and the print output helps with consistency.. the calibration between an i1, a Colormunki, and a Spyder2 are probably even more different than if you checked against any 2 of the same device.. and 2 of the same device would still not be 100% spot-on to each other.)

Thanks for the detailed post Heebie!

As I've said, my monitor is calibrated and up to this all the photos I've printed off look more or less exactly the same as they do on the screen. It's been a while since it's been calibrated, but I don't think it's too far off, and I use it in the conditions that the monitor has been calibrated for (dark room, door closed, blinds down etc). I must look into buying one myself, the one that I use from time to time (I can't for the life of me remember what it's called), automatically monitors the room's ambient lght, and changes the screen brightness to suit it.

The printed image isn't soft at all, it's nice and sharp. That's just my late night, slow shutter speed trying to lean over a bed while letting the small room lightbulb illuminate the image softness It wasn't really the sharpness I was concerned about showing, just the colours!

How can you calibrate the print out results? Just curious about that?

sineadw

Adobe RGB is better, I go for relative colormetric over perceptual (why do you go perceptual Steve?).. And I tick all the boxes in the colour management policies box (all in edit>colour settings). When you send the doc to the printer (through photoshop?) and tell it to colour manage, are you then turning OFF colour management in your printer preferences before you print? That bit's very important too.

Use the correct profile for the printer and the paper (sometimes they're separate, sometimes not - don't know about yours.. The higher end printers have profiles for different papers). And make sure the resolution is the optimal for your printer also.

Heebie

You need to have a photocolorimeter (Like a Colormunki or a Spyder) or spectrophotometer (like an i1) that can measure screens and paper output. (Most Spyder setups only do screens.. with the others, generally the software licensing determines if you have the ability to do printouts or just screens.)

First, you calibrate the screen.. then you calibrate the printer. You load the printer up with the type of paper you want to use for a print, the software sends a print of colored squares to the printer, and then you use the device to measure each square that prints out.
The software then builds a color profile based on what colors actually came out of the printer when it "told" the printer to print a certain color.
Then..you can convert the colors in a file to the new printer profile before printing, and the colors actually in the file will be adjusted so that when you send it to the printer.. instead of sending the color encode in the picture.. it sends the color that will actually come out correct (or as close as possible to correct.)

It builds a chart of things like:

When I sent 128 red 128 green 128 blue, I got 137 red 122 green 127 blue

and it does that for each color "swatch" it uses. When it goes to print... it looks at it and says, "OK. if I want 137 red 122 green 127 blue.. I should send 128,128.128 instead.)

(That's a VERY simplistic view of what it's doing.. but it is functionally correct.)

It's exactly the same thing that's done for your screen. Your computer is "told" by the calibration device [by means of a color-profile that is applied to the monitor output before it it sent to the video card] what colors should actually be sent, when it actually wants to show you a particular color.

Hopefully it's not TOO technical an answer.. although I can't really think of how to make it less technical... and still be accurate.

GhostInTheRuins wrote: »

How can you calibrate the print out results? Just curious about that?

Heebie

I actually use Kodak ProPhoto for my working space. (It's a lot larger gamut than Adobe 1998 RGB.. so it's "better" for the same reason that Adobe 1998 is better than sRGB.. Adobe 1998 is a much bigger color space than sRGB.. ProPhoto is several orders of magnitude larger than Adobe 1998.

That way.. when I'm working with an image..I really don't have any colors that are out of gamut. (they just don't tend to happen in ProPhoto.. it's bloody huge.)

If I don't know what a print output device is going to be, or if it's going to be for the internet or something, I'll convert it to sRGB first.. as most printers can't reproduce a LOT of the colors in Adobe 1998 (and a lot fewer of those in Kodak ProPhoto).. most printers can produce about 80% of what's in sRGB.

Relative colorimetric vs perceptual is something arguable. They are different algorithms used for re-mapping colors from one color space to another. Perceptual tries to use what the human eye is actually capable of seeing, and likely to see, in order to do the conversion. Absolute colorimetric tries to do a 1:1 conversation of "this color in this gamut = this color in this other gamut" Relative colorimetric is similar to absolute, but it's doing the calculations relative to "where" within the new & old color gamuts that the color falls, rather than going from the color's relationship to black.

Most professionals tend to use perceptual, since they are almost always doing their output for human eyes. Personal preference for the output you get is really the best way to decide what you want to use. (I use perceptual... changed after a photoshop seminar that I took back in 2001 or 2002 with a guy named Jim Gipe at Pivot Media in Florence, Massachusetts, USA.) I used to work in that industry doing a lot of similar work.. although not nearly so glorified. He's good.

sineadw wrote: »

Adobe RGB is better, I go for relative colormetric over perceptual (why do you go perceptual Steve?).. And I tick all the boxes in the colour management policies box (all in edit>colour settings). When you send the doc to the printer (through photoshop?) and tell it to colour manage, are you then turning OFF colour management in your printer preferences before you print? That bit's very important too.

Use the correct profile for the printer and the paper (sometimes they're separate, sometimes not - don't know about yours.. The higher end printers have profiles for different papers). And make sure the resolution is the optimal for your printer also.

stcstc

there are 2 approaches to colour space

1. use the widest possible. prophoto is one of the widest. to the point where some of the gamut is outside the perception of the human eye.

2. using some math. for certain subjects, smaller gamut can actually produce better results.

all of the colour gamuts are described with values between 0 and 255 per channel.

so if you have a very wide gamut it will have large steps between the 0-255 increments.

if you have a smaller gamut, like sRGB you will have smaller steps.

where this tends to help is particularly portraits as skin tones have a very smooth change in tones. as you will get a smooth change in tones.




the other thing about really wide gamut colour spaces is they aint ever gonna be printable i suspect. the very latest epson printers can print full adobe rgb on certain papers etc but i am not sure there are many people in the world that would notice it