Yeah, mine come out ok (to me) when I print without doing major work on them first. But maybe they're crap and I my standards are low. What kind of printer is it? If it is a Kyocera dot matrix printer from 1988 that might be the problem. ASCII art almost never looks as good as the original photo.

We need an example. Scan one of the prints and post a picture.

Actually, when you put it like that, it's kinda hot ! :p

After which I'll start a thread about scanners and color profiles.

It's a Lexmark. It's an all-in-one job, I don't expect the highest quality out of it. But really, a print of an unedited photo is so dramatically different than it looks on the screen or the camera, and more importantly just looks bad. Maybe we will try a scan and see how it comes out.

I didn't get a chance to talk to my coworker today as i wanted. hopefully tomorrow.

But I have been thinking about this and one thing really sticks out to meI believe you may have an issue more than just a profile. If you are having to take the cyan to nothing, something is wrong between the software and the printer.

See if you can 'reset' the settings and profiles back to a starting point. I am not sure how to do that, but I am sure you can figure it out.

yeah, cool aint it? :evil:

As far as I can tell, everything is at default. The color management dialog shows no color profile associated with the printer and we haven't touched any color profile settings anywhere else.

Love the short hair!

...and yes, color profiles are likely what will be your saving grace :)

Hmm...

I would suggest reinstalling the printer driver; doing a complete clean install. Download the whole installer package, wiping out the current one. Also, try printing a purely flat (no profile) printout to see what you get. Basically, you want to find (if possible) the best settings for the printer to get the results you want based on how it looks on your monitor.

Sorry I haven't been much help so far. As you surmised, consumer printers are not my thing and I am more of a pressroom guy than prepress (if you want to talk about how to reproduce 500,000 of these in the quickest and most cost effective manner to suit your needs, then I am your man!). The other challenge is that all the people I know are Mac people (it is the de facto platform in the print business), so trying to find the PC solution is not as easy for me to hunt down.

How does it print things that aren't photos?

If you have a page with various blocks of color, does it print correctly or is everything still blue?

I agree that having to drop cyan to nothing is really odd.

I have an HP Photosmart 8250 that I really love. (as much as HP has gone downhill in recent years, I'll still recommend it.) Ink is individual cartridges (instead of all color in one cart.) I can buy ink and get some photo paper for it for about $40 total.

What's funny is that I have never messed with the color of my laser printer at work. And my monitor could use some tweaking.