Emma Watson + something in questionable taste
 

Now that I have Kevy's attentions, I've got some questions about printers and color profiles.

:D

This may be too much of a consumer-level question, but hopefully you'll have some insight.

Here's the issue: I take a photo with my camera (same problems across multiple cameras, so which camera doesn't matter). I'm happy with how the photo looks on the camera's screen. I put it on my computer, and I'm happy with how it looks on the computer screen (color, saturation, brightness, etc.), without touching it. I print it. It looks like crap. Way too blue, over saturated. To get it to print decently, I've got to spend a lot of time tweaking the image. Mess with saturation, drop the cyan channel to nearly nothing, mess with brightness...until it looks like crap on the screen. Then it'll print well.

Most advice I've found so far talks about printing some test patterns, then adjusting the monitor to match what's printed. I have 2 issues with that. First, the color controls on my laptop monitor are nill, can't really do much. Second, even if I can get the monitor tweaked, it just means that everything's going to look like crap by default on the screen. Yeah, it'd take some of the guess work out of adjusting the photos before printing, but I'd rather not have to do that much adjustment to every single photo.

I gather that the solution has something to do with ICC profiles and the like. But I'm going around in circles, completely confused. Do I need to be messing with the color profile in the editing program (Photoshop Elemements)? For the printer? Both? How do I know what profile to use? What if I edit in Photoshop but print from another program? Our printer documentation mentions an XPS driver, will that help? Why can't I find an ICC profile for our printer model? Aaaaaaagh!!!!

Help much appreciated.

Oh, and here.

Easy!

Long hair. She looks better with long hair.



Err, that was the question right?

dunno. kinda diggin the short hair thing on her. the longer hair is without a doubt great, but I like that shes trying out new looks. love to see her as a ginger..or pink.

edit: and I know jack sh!t about printers...but good luck with that

You've brought up one of the issues that printers fight on regular basis: "I want it to look like it looks on my screen." Here's that bad news: it ain't ever gonna happen.

The three key reasons are:

• Your monitor is is Additive Color and print is Subtractive Color.
• Your monitor has a much broader Color Gamut.
• Your monitor uses RGB color whereas print is CMYK color.

So now that I told you why you can't match, I will tell you that you are heading in the right direction using color profiles. I have never messed with them on my system (the Mac uses them fairly automatically and seamlessly - not meant as a format war volley, just mentioning it), but I will see if I can find some more information for you (I am running late for work).


Agreed!

I know it's never going to look the same, but it's so very very different right now, and consistently so. It seems like there should be an easy way to simply say, "Printer, I know you think that color information X in the image = ink mixture Y, but really it should be ink mixture Y - 80% cyan + some brightness. Every time. Remember that, please." Which is what I gather color profiles are, I just can't for the life of my figure out how to find/generate a color profile, or how to actually apply it so that I'm affecting JUST the printer and not the image file, or the screen, etc. It's driving me batty.

Is it just me or does she kind of look like Macaulay Culkin in a wig in that second picture?

I have issues like this with blue/purple on my monitor and when I send to the printer but I've been able to overcome those. I'm referring more to large blocks of color though and not photographs which I don't tend to have much of an issue with. That and an exact match is something I rarely if ever need.

Good luck!

To me, the short hair makes her look like Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. Creepy.

My deal with the printer is this:

Take pictures with camera.
Put pictures on computer.
Print pictures.
Pictures come out all freaky.

If I have to mess with the color on every photo before I print, there's something wrong with the printer, right?

I'd think it was the printer too. Ours come out fairly good - it's not exactly as on the screen but nothing to fuss with.

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.