Emma Watson + something in questionable taste

[Ghoulish Delight]

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



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.